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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Simon Phipps is the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, co-ordinating Sun’s extensive participation in free and open source software communities and actively participating in the global conversation they express. Prior to this appointment he co-founded Sun’s pioneering staff weblog facility at blogs.sun.com.

A computer industry insider of 20+ years standing, Simon has worked in such hands-on roles as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst as well as being involved at a strategic level in some of the world’s leading computer companies. Fascinated by the idea of ‘action at a distance’, 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. He joined Sun in mid-2000.

He takes an active interest in several free/open source software organisations, including serving on the Advisory Board of the GNOME Foundation. He holds a degree in electronic engineering and is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Computer Society where he is on the committee of his local branch.

Simon lives in the UK with his family but is based in Silicon Valley in the US. With membership of airline frequent flyer clubs thus taken care of, he is free to indulge in his favourite pastimes of reading, writing poetry, collecting music, taking photographs and playing with cool toys.

More information can be found on his personal home page and blog and on Sun’s open source home page.

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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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