A Statement From the Listar Project Founder (Score 2)

Hi, everyone. I'm Rachel Blackman, the original designer/author of Listar, and still the lead developer on it. I'd like to make a clarification here. :)

Neither I nor any other member of the Listar project holds ill-will against MCF for enforcing the trademark. The whole story is simply this:

When I started writing Listar, it was a replacement for Majordomo specifically for my own machines. I called it 'Listar', the Spanish word for 'list'. It wasn't until a year later that 'ListSTAR' came to my attention, since, well, I don't use Macintoshes. I contacted StarNINE, then the owners of the package, and was told 'ListSTAR is defunct and no longer sold or supported, plus you're under UNIX and we're under Macintosh. Don't stress it.' So, perhaps unwisely, I didn't.

Fast-forward two years, to when a company named MCF Software bought ListSTAR from the remains of StarNINE. The product is now revived and thus no longer defunct, and Listar (which can run on the FreeBSD-based MacOS X, where ListSTAR does not) is suddenly both a threat to the trademark and a potential source of confusion. Faroukh Irani of MCF contacted the Listar project politely about the name change and didn't get lawyers involved at all. He handled it very nicely, and should be commended for that. Nor is he in the wrong to enforce his trademark; this wasn't a case of 'the little guy' getting stomped on, this was a case of an unfortunate case where the situation changed and not to the benefit of the Open Source project.

That said, we have gone and picked another (not yet announced) name, and we want to trademark that to prevent future confusion. Our problem is that in looking into that, we've found that it is very hard to trademark something - enforcably - which is not used in commercial trade.

People say 'Linux is trademarked by Torvalds', but that's not entirely true. From what I've found in my poking around, SSC (who publish Linux Journal) and RedHat - both of whom use 'Linux' in commercial trade - obtained the trademark on behalf of Torvalds.

It seems like trademark law is biased against free and open projects, probably largely due to ignorance and outdated laws. The question here is simply... has anyone ever really looked into trademarking an OpenSource project in an enforcable way?

I have no problem with changing the name of this mailing list package now, over the ListSTAR dispute, but I have a great deal of trouble with the idea that I could have the name stolen out from under me again in another three years if someone decides they like it for their own commercial project. Hence the desire to obtain a legal trademark on it. :)

--Sparks