Thanks for returning. You're a very smart person.
It seems that Digium, the creators of Asterisk, have registered purchased www.asteriskathome.com, the former domain and name of the open source project TrixBox, and is re-directing it to their latest project AsteriskNow, Digium’s answer to TrixBox. I found out about this a few days ago, but when Tom and Alec weighed-in on this, I thought I would throw my hat in the ring as well.
For those of you who do not know, Asterisk@Home was created by Andrew Gillis and was designed to enable the home (or small office) user to quickly set up a full featured Asterisk PBX with a web based interface in about an hour on a dedicated PC. The ease of installation, the graphical user interface, and increased features/functionality (including integration with sales force) made Asterisk@Home an enormouse hit and allegedly lead to legal pressure (from trademark infringement) from Digium (owner of the Asterisk trademark) forcing Andrew to change the open source project name to TrixBox, which was recently acquired by Fonality.
All of this seems a bit “rough neck” for an open source company. Pressuring a project (which was started from the same community that helped make Asterisk the success it is today) to change its name once it became a perceived competitor to the Asterisk software. Not to mention that their trademark policy seems a bit selective, when a quick search of Google shows the following sites utilizing the Asterisk/Digium brand name for commercial purposes.
http://www.digium.co.uk/
http://www.digiumcards.com/
http://www.asteriskhardware.com
http://www.asteriskdocs.com
http://www.asteriskguru.com
http://www.asteriskvoipnews.com
http://www.asterisk.co.nz
http://www.asterisktutorials.com
As a marketing professional myself, I am big on protecting a brand name and trademarks. If you are going to police it though, be consistent about it. Do not be selective and do it to keep your brand name from losing its “value”, not to increase traffic to your own site for nothing other then perceived capitalistic gain. As Alec suggested, “buy the domain and bury it.”
What ever happen to altruistic open source companies?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Digium not altrusitic? Digium actively develops the OpenSource Asterisk codebase with a staff of
full-time developers, shepherds the community of active outside contributors, and does the legal legwork to document the lineage of contributions to prevent a SCO-like incident… and none of these operations generate a dime of revenue. It might be argued that protecting the Asterisk brand by trademark enforcement is altruistic as well, in the sense that it protects dilution of the software around which this community is built. Witness the similar defenses around the Linux, Apache, and Sendmail trademarks.
I’d suppose the inconsistencies you perceive in trademark enforcement are simply partners and community participants that have been granted permission to use Digium trademarks.
Roderick, I would disagree, from my knowledge, with your statements above.
First, Digium makes a ton of money off of the open source community. Yes, they actively work on it and release new versions, but there are thousands of others out there contributing to the community, to the source code, with little more then “name recognition” among peers as reward for their hardwork. Much of this free engineering work has been integrated into Asterisk Business Edition, Digiums pay-for version of Asterisk.
Second, if you go look at those websites, most of them, are not “partners.” They are either selling some sort of Asterisk based product, solution, or consultation. Again, if you are going to police your brand, be consistent and exclude everyone.
I like Digium, I like Asterisk, I am huge fan of open source. I just did not expect and open source company to pressure a company (a memeber of the community and a potential partner) to change their name, then buy that name and point it to their new porudct which competes with that company’s product.
I am all for making money, but this was just a little unexpected coming from an open-source company.
But you have a link on your page to the left from http://www.asteriskvoipnews.com
I guess maybe Digium only has a problem if you are in direct competition with them and sell say Sangoma Cards and Rhino Cards on a site like http://www.digiumcards.com
my 2 pennies
Mike White
.e4
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