[2trill2spill]

Let me get this straight, your mad because Fabrice Bellard, the person who started ffmpeg, asserted his trademark on the libav folks because their fork initially used the name ffmpeg?

Seeing as your the maintainer for QuasselDroid, How would you like it if a group of contributors wanted to take the project in a different direction then you, so they fork it, call their fork QuasselDroid, and then say your branch is immoral, like you have throughout this page, I doubt you would enjoy this, and if you owned the QuasselDroid trademark I'm sure you would use it too.

[kuschku]

Actually, with quasseldroid we had the same situation as with ffmpeg/libav – but I’m the one who forked it.

Just in our case the people maintaining the (now dead) original repo decided to give up maintainership to me. (And so we merged everything back).

Also, in your example, I would have no issue.

If another group decided to fork and improve the project, and have more development going on than me, I’d end up just contributing to their project.

This is open source and open development, the very concept is that anyone can and will fork, and may even become the canonical version.

[reality_czech]

With all due respect, you are not answering the question that the parent poster asked. If someone created a hostile fork of QuassalDroid, and made decisions that you disagreed with, I doubt you would be OK with them using the same name for the project. The right to fork is fundamental in open source, but there is no right to present someone else's work as your own, or to confuse the general public about which version of a software package they are downloading. People should be able to decide for themselves which software to download, not be fooled by someone passing off something different as the same thing. That's why trademarks exist. Enforcing trademarks is not bad or wrong.

[kuschku]

The fork would only be "hostile" because I disagreed with it.

And why should I have any more say on this than the other contributors?

This is open development, the very idea is that people are replaced all the time.

[reality_czech]

Trademarks can be held by an organization, not just by one person. This is how Apache software works, for example. In that case, there are bylaws in place to ensure that the interests of different people are represented, decisions can be made fairly, and toxic people can be prevented from killing the project.

In contrast, projects such as Python have a "benevolent dictator" moderl where one person has the final say about the direction of development. There is nothing unethical about a BDFL model in open source; it's just a choice that a community can make.

You seem to be deliberately confusing yourself about the distinction between forking, which is always allowed, and representing your fork as the original project, which is never allowed. If you are still confused, think about it this way: would you want someone to attach a bunch of malware to your project and redistribute it under its original name, as if it were your version? You can't prevent this without trademark law.