As anyone who visits Drupal.org more then one a year will know, Dries owns the trademark of "Drupal". Dries want this mark to be protected from The Bad People and to be used by The Good People. Since law doesn't really "see" good or bad people but good or bad actions, he had to write a policy on how and when you can use the word Drupal in a service.

For example, you are not allowed to say that you provide "Drupal Certification" programs, but if your company is called ACME, you are allowed to use "ACME Drupal Certification". This makes sense, we are not a MySQL AB or RedHat Inc; we are a passionate Open Source community. So you are encouraged to build your own brand "ACME" and lean on the shoulder of the Open Source giant Drupal, fair enough I think. Mind you: if you spot a "Official Drupal Certification program", you are encouraged to contact the Drupal Association and file a trademark issue. Also note that as an engineer you are probably better of a taring center that does not claim to have "Drupal Certifications".

Some might ask why it took so long to create this policy For those Dries / Kieran created an timeline explaining all steps. My own answer to questions with "when" in it, would have been "done is a four letter word". So if you want to make this policy better by asking question, hinting, dropping suggestions, please point your browser towards http://groups.drupal.org/node/15023 and read the post, the comments, the answers and step if if you think you can add anything to the discussion.

Lezers van mac-zone weten het wellicht al; ID&T (een herrie club voor geestelijk minder bedeelden die niet kunnen dansen en geen gehoor meer hebben) durft
een dreigbrief te schrijven naar mac-zone. Omdat het logo van mac-zone erg zou lijken op het logo van ID&T. Lees de details op de maczone site.

Het logo dat u gebruikt komt qua vorm en kleurstelling sterk overeen met het logo van Q-dance, hetgeen als beeld- en/of woordmerk door ID&T is geregistreerd. Dit houdt in dat ID&T exclusief gerechtigd is gebruik te maken van het logo en zich mag verzetten tegen het gebruik van eenzelfde of sterk daarop gelijkend logo. Met gebruik van het logo kunt u immers bij het publiek de indruk wekken dat uw bedrijf en de door uw gepubliceerde website in verband staan met ID&T. Hiermee trekt u ongerechtvaardigd voordeel van en doet u afbreuk aan de reputatie van ID&T.

Proest zegt u? Dubbel proest!

Gelukkig zitten er wat jongens (m/v) bij mac-zone die wel iets begrijpen over hoe kansloos, zinloos en dom deze aktie van een overgeiligere "ik moet mijn target halen" meester-in-de-rechten-twatje is. Die wijken dus niet, weten dat het "power button" logo een defacto standaard is geworden voor het aan of uit zetten van een elektronisch device en ook dus op alle Mac's aanwezig.

Dat ID&T's marketing afdeling zo lui was om niet een onderscheidend logo te maken, maar een rip of te selecteren van een bestaand logo, dat kan men achteraf niet aan mac-zone verwijten.

ID&T geeft hiermee niet alleen weer geen verstand te hebben van beeldrecht, copyright en aanverwante intellectueel eigendomsrecht, maar vergist zich ook behoorlijk in hoe zoiets "viral" tegen je kan keren online! De tijden dat de platenboer de baas was zijn voorbij stampgasten, dreidbrieven sturen heeft alleen zin als je ze gaat waar maken en alleen als je gelijk hebt. Doen alsof je mikt op de knie-en met een waterpistooltje en de trekker niet overhaalt terwijl je ook nog eens de bad guy bent, wreekt zich tegen je. Ennu, ik heb nog wat kandidaten voor je!

update: ID&T ziet in dat ze zich vergist hebben; "shit zeg, nooit een website aanvallen, die gasten hebben bezoek! Waarom heeft onze site dat niet?"/. Wel jammer, de disclaimer op de mac-zon site meldt nu dat ze niet gelieerd zijn aan de stampgasten, ik denk eerder dat ID&T had moeten zeggen dat ze geen creatieve designert hadden en dus maar het aan/uit knopje gekanteld hadden. Ik zou ook helemaal niet met die stampgasten gelieerd willen zijn.

ID&T, power off...

As people know from reading the footer on Drupal.org, Dries is the owner of the trademark "Drupal". Trademarks -and law in general- are complicated; not something every Drupal coder, tester, user might understand or is even interested in.

However, there are always people that are not interested in the community, do not care about the law, but only care for themselves. They want to make money abusing the assets of the Drupal community and not by using it, contributing to it.

One of those kinds of people registered Drupal.nl some time ago, claiming it was an internal name for a service called "Domain name Registration tool Using PHP And Linux... And ran an anti Open Source CMS site on the domain claiming that Open Source solution where thousands of people are working on and millions of people use every day, could never be as good as his own home made CMS.

Dries wrote this man a letter, a letter stating that Dries as the owner of the Drupal trademark would like to get the ownership of the domain. We had an agreement however, the man sold it to another person days before he would transfer the domain to Dries.

This new owner will be named here; Robert de Bock from Me in IT.nl. So we had to start again, contacting him. But Robert was different; he knows about Open Source, cares about Drupal and without any legal pushing transferred the domain free towards Dries! So a big "Hooray" for Robert de Bock, a nice person that bought in good faith the Drupal.NL domain and when Dries contacted him handed al rights of the domain to Dries!

krokodil-boerland-home:~ bert$ whois drupal.nl
Domain name:
drupal.nl

Status: active

Registrant:
BUY000971-LEASE
D Buytaert
...
Administrative contact:
BUY000943-LEASE
D. Buytaert
...

If you visit Drupal.NL right now, it will be redirected to the Dutch Drupal.BE site. This might or might not change in the future, that is up to Dries. But at least we do not have a Drupal.NL site running on the web claiming that Open Source is bad.

Thank you Robert for contributing the domain to Dries and thereby to the bigger Drupal community!

The first owner? Lets forget about him.
The windmill? It's located in the village I live and just there as a cliché. We do not walk on wooden shoes, we don not life in windmills and we do not smoke weed. But we do care about Drupal and domain names.

Today I got a "follow" from Podblanc on my twitter account. I get dayly followers I do not know, mosty stupid bots disguised as attractive girls that folow 5k people and have 20 followers (extreem stupid people who fail the Turning test ).

I always checkout my followers before follwing them, and it looked that this podblanc was human and ... is running a Drupal site at podblanc.com.

There are days that I feel proud. Proud to be part of a community that builds software that helps people to communicate. Proud to be in that community from the early days. So I have seen the tech communities that embraced Drupal as a tool to communicate. And then gave the media companies -new and old media- that had a good and cheap option to facilitate users. And then came the (from US PoV liberal) political parties in the US that enabled relativly unknown persons to run for president-candidate. Then the small local communities around churches, local red cross organisations and even the big ones like Amnesty. And I am proud that I was a very very small part in the world that enabled this.

But I never NEVER have been "proud" to be white. I never thought that one race, religion or sex is superiour above another. I have the luck to have old parents, who have been through what in central Europe is called "The War" (World War II) and have told me about the horrors. I have had the luck to have travelled around the world to see other people, get in touch with other cultures and to have visited Auschwitz. I know the horrors, I know the pain, I know about the waste of lifes.

I am not the hating kind of person, but somewhere deep in me, I hate people who hate people. And yes I do understand the paradox there. But I am not to keen on right winged Neo Nazi's who refuse to learn from the past, or even to accept the past.

So I am not proud that this white-site is using Drupal. I am sad that we created something that can be misused in this way. But like any tool, it can be used for good and bad. It is the person holding the knife that decides to create a sculpture or go for the kill, not the maker of the knife.

Sometime.. just like now. I wish the GPL was "a bit discriminating" for who it was legal to use and for who not. But you can not have a "bit of freedom"; you have it or you dont. And if that is what we are facing, I am proud that I am part of a freedom where stupid white (or black) people can say stupid things about (white or) black people ... using Drupal.

Proud but with a bad taste in my mouth.

Today I was a guest speaker at the business day of the Dutch Joomla Days. While this might seem odd, the subject of these days is "building bridges". Building bridges towards other CMS-es, other databases, other communities and hence towards Drupal.

I give these kinds of "pro Drupal" talks almost a bi-weekly basis now, where often other CMS-es are present as well. Last week I did one at eduvision where 100+ people where impressed by Drupal. Most often, the "competition" is Joomla and Typo3, both rather popular in The Netherlands (and Germany). While I do think that Joomla is good (enough) for the SoHo market and the audience of Drupal is much broader (from enterprises to personal blogs) and deeper (from video towards for example a resume site), these CMS-es are often compared. So normally, I try to make clear why Drupal is so much better then Joomla; better user management, roles, hooks, CCK, views, workflow, tableless design, multi-site install and almost forgotten but still miles ahead of any other CMS; taxonomy. There are zillion of ways where Drupal is clearly the leader in the field, but leading is sometimes not the same as "fitting".

This time however, I tried not too bash Joomla to much but to start building bridges. We do have a lot of the same problems that we can work on together. For example, we both use the GPL and we both have to protect our assets. Be both have a legal body protecting the community and facilitating the community, in Drupal's case, the Drupal Association.

That is why I was interested in the talk of one other speaker; James Vasile. James works for the SFLC and he is on the board of OpenSourceMatters and helping as a legal counsel for the Drupal Association. Most of the other Board Members of the Association spoke to James on the Boston DrupalCon ut since I was not there, it was good to speak to James during Lunch.

We taled about his passion, RMS, his other Open source projects / customers, how the SFLC is financed and the GPL3 as well as some other things. It is good to say the face you have exchanged mails with and it is good to build a relation between the SFLC, Joomla and Drupal. Communications is all about building bridges.