kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Marco Ciampa <ciampix@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 11:00:41PM -0800, Ouabache Designworks wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 10:52 PM, Carsten Schoenert <c.schoenert@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> 
> > Am 06.02.2018 um 07:15 schrieb Andrey Kuznetsov:
> > > KiCad is open source.
> >
> > That doesn't prevents you from being trapped by patent trolls etc. So
> > the concerns of Ouabache Designworks becomes more serious that KiCad is
> > getting more popular.
> >
> > > Last thing we need is to spend resources on legalize and trademark shit
> > > we give away.
> >
> > Sure, such work nobody really needs or want.
> > But the more KiCad is growing the more there is a need to keep all the
> > various corners together in e efficient way. And this will taking
> > resources mostly at a time you don't want to spend energy on it. So it's
> > not a bad thing to think about possible problems in the future now.
> >
> > --
> > Regards
> > Carsten Schoenert
> >
> Yes, Look at the Risc-v folks. They are open source but they have a
> non-profit foundation set up
> to deal with vision,managing ,fund raising etc. The Kicad name is becoming
> valuable and you need
> to protect it.

Software fundations are born exactly for this reason. We may ask to FSF
(or FSFE) and I am sure they will be more than happy to help us. The
alternative is to create one by ourselves but, due to our small footprint
I hardly think it is something we can manage...

Here you can find a list:

http://flossfoundations.org/foundation-directory

Another due action IMHO is to register the KiCad TM, as Linus was once
forced to do with Linux.

-- 


Marco Ciampa

I know a joke about UDP, but you might not get it.

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 GNU/Linux User #78271
 FSFE fellow #364

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