What's in a Name: Can Trademarks be Helpful to Free Software Projects?

Karen M. Sandler is an attorney with the Software Freedom Law Center and serves as an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Prior to joining SFLC, she worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Sandler received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Sandler received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union.

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A well-known and respected leader in the Free software community, computer industry veteran Simon Phipps has been involved at a strategic level in some of the world’s leading technology companies. He has worked in such hands-on roles as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst, as well as run a software publishing company. He worked with OSI standards in the eighties, on the first commercial collaborative conferencing software in the nineties, and helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM. Today he takes an active interest in Free and Open Source software organisations, including the advisory boards of OpenSolaris, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC and GNOME, and is a widely read thought-leader.

In mid-2000 he joined Sun Microsystems where he helped pioneer Sun’s employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes. In 2005 he was appointed Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, co-ordinating Sun’s extensive participation in Free and Open Source software communities. In that role he has overseen the conversion to Free software of the full Java platform, the Solaris UNIX operating system, the SPARC architecture and the rest of Sun’s broad portfolio, all under OSI-approved Free licenses. He has also been an outspoken advocate of the value of Open Document Format (ODF) for businesses and governments. Most recently he has been an advisor to local and national government agencies across Europe, the Pacific Rim and Latin America as they have devised and implemented strategies around Free and Open Source software.

He holds a degree in electronic engineering and is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Computer Society. His personal home page and blog is http://www.webmink.net

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Gervase Markham is a long-time Mozilla project contributor and Bugzilla hacker. He currently works for the Mozilla Foundation, “greasing the wheels” in the Mozilla community. Although he says that his job is now so eclectic it “defies description”, among other things, he has been closely involved in formulating the Foundation’s trademark policy.

When he’s not working, he also contributes to OpenStreetMap, and recently organized a pledge which resulted in one OSM volunteer being sent on a mapping field trip to the Caribbean island of Antigua for a week. He’s sad that it wasn’t him.

Gerv is a committed Christian, and member of Enfield Evangelical Free Church in Enfield, UK, where he lives. The title of his blog, Hacking for Christ, reflects his view that Christians should do everything to the glory of God.

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Larry Augustin is the CEO of SugarCRM. As an angel investor and advisor to early stage technology companies, he currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Fonality, Hyperic, Medsphere, OSDL, Pentaho, SugarCRM, VA Software (NASDAQ: LNUX), and XenSource. One of the group who coined the term “Open Source”, he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. Worth Magazine named him to their list of the Top 50 CEOs in 2000. From 2002 to 2004 he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners. In 1993 he founded VA Linux (now VA Software), where he served as CEO until August 2002 and led the company through an IPO in 1999. Larry can be found online at http://lmaugustin.com.

Chris Messina arrived in San Francisco in 2004 as a volunteer for the Mozilla Foundation, leading the Spread Firefox community marketing project in raising over $220,000 in microdonations to launch Firefox to a worldwide audience with an ad in the New York Times.

He went on to co-found the Flock web browser and helped to organize the first-ever BarCamp in Palo Alto in 2005. Later, he co-founded Citizen Agency with Tara Hunt, opening a shared work environment called Citizen Space, giving rise to the coworking movement.

Chris now works on DiSo, an effort that he co-founded with Steve Ivy, to facilitate the development of building blocks for the open, social web. He is also a board member of the OpenID Foundation and works part-time for Vidoop, a Portland-based provider of secure internet identity technologies.

He has spoken at numerous conferences around the world and has been quoted in national publications such as The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, MIT Technology Review and Wired. Chris is well-known in the Web 2.0, open source, and startup worlds for his community advocacy and work on open standards initiatives like microformats, OpenID, OAuth and Activity Streams.

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