Unless you have trademarked the name, you don’t get to reserve it for a rainy day, anyone should be able to pick up the torch and continue the project without having to start from scratch with a new unknown name.
gorhill stopped doing uBlock and passed it to others, who subsequently took it in a direction he didn’t like, so that he resumed maintenance under the name uBlock Origin (since the name “uBlock” had been transferred).
So this time when he stops maintaining a project, he’s avoiding the same thing happening.
> I will never hand over development to whoever, I had my lesson in the past -- I wouldn't like that someone would turn the project into something I never intended it to become (monetization, feature bloat, etc.). At most I would archive the project and whoever is free to fork under a new name. For now I resisted doing this, so people will have to be patient for new stable release.
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/i240ds/reques...
Contribution graph for the original uBlock project during this time frame: https://github.com/uBlock-LLC/uBlock/graphs/contributors?fro...
and now compare to the 'personal fork' that is uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/graphs/contributors?from=2...
So if 'squatting' the name of your own OSS project is considered 'user hostile' then let this be a lesson to people considering giving up their project: the person you give it to may abuse your trust and the trust of the community in order to further their own agenda, in this situation it was all just pretty harmless petty drama but it might not always work out so well.
Random Github projects aren't organisations with funding and staff with rules and responsibilities to keep the project running, it's okay to archive the project and let the community decide what to do, giving the project to the first person who asks may end up achieving the same thing as archiving the project or it may come back to bite you in the arse damaging your reputation in the process.
Not a lawyer, could be wrong about this.
Trademarks don't need to be registered to be enforceable. Registration makes things easier for everyone by stating the registrant's intented scope of the trademark and makes a few things easier for the owner. However, the enforceability of a trademark rests on its awareness by customers, active use by the owner, and active defence of the trademark by its owners. uMatrix certainly is certainly a trade mark, however, the two latter criteria are probably not met.
I'm also not a lawyer, just interested in this stuff. This is not legal advice. And of course the details will be wildly different in different parts of the world.
Again, I don't know anything, but I'm surprised that uMatrix would count as having been "commercially" used. And as you point out, these two criteria probably wouldn't be met if the project becomes inactive:
> active use by the owner, and active defence of the trademark by its owners
It's also still used by the owner, as it's still listed in several extension stores.
Trademark protection also doesn't end over night. Trademarks are generally protected for a few years after the owner ceased to use it. Also, one should keep in mind that trademarks aren't primarily an intellectual property concept like patents and copyrights. Their main purpose is to protect consumers from copycats and fake products.
As uMatrix was distributed to users through the extensions platfrom, this is already sufficient to classify as commercial use.
You already have the right to copy all of someone's years of hard work, add a tiny patch, and pass it off as your own project with a new name. The very least you can do is give respect to the original author by allowing them to keep their original name.
Then there's potential for libel. Let's say you fork a project, keep the original name, and then pepper the project with Nazi propaganda. The original author is trying to get a job, and his resume has the name of the original project. A prospective employer searches the name and finds the new project (with the old name) full of hate speech. If he gave away the old name, a libel suit to change the new project's name may fail, and his reputation might be forever tarnished.
Case in point: keepass -> keepassx -> keepassxc, where both keepass and keepassxc are maintained and are essentially separate projects.
Obviously "anyone should be able to pick up the torch" has the issue that the "anyone" may well be a malicious person who is seeking to defraud the users for monetary gain.
https://blogs.findlaw.com/free_enterprise/2017/05/4-defenses...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverherzfeld/2013/02/28/failu...
μMatrix