Comments - MariaDB Trademark Policy

In the spirit of openness, there is no notable difference if a trademark is hold by a company or an non profit organization. (There are many non profit organizations that have more closed trademark policies, at least compared to the MariaDB one. See, for example, Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/policy.html). Nothing wrong with their policy, they keep things closed to ensure they get the control they need to keep up the quality and avoid confusion). What really matters is how open the trademark policy is and in this aspect we think we have gone very far.

Trademarks in open source are generally moved to non profit entities AFTER the project has become hugely successful and there are lots of different sponsors of the project who wants to participate actively with the project and the non profit. MariaDB is not there yet and doing the move too soon may actually make it harder to later get active cooperative sponsors.

The reason we say 'like' instead of 'to' is that we don't yet know how successful the ODBA will be and we want to keep the options open where it's assigned if 'something goes wrong'. I agree that we need some clarifications who is in charge of the assignment if something goes wrong. In my mind it's the active developers of MariaDB that will have the final say in where the trademark should be moved. However, as Monty Program Ab is owned by it's employers, it's them who have the final say in the MariaDB trademark policy. As all of them have a high interest in the future success and existence of MariaDB, you can however be sure that we will do what's best long term for the project!