Boxes and Glue

keyjnote, a fine software project, is no longer at sourceforge.net. What is more, no public repository remains with the code history, at least that I could find (destroying it is, IMO, a grave sin in the ethos of free/open software).

The reason? According to debian forums:

KeyJnote has come under trademark litigation from Apple, 
and the main developer is currently AWOL. For the time being, 
you can access the code at 
http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jrm8005/accentuate.html, and hopefully 
there will be more information there soon about the future of keyjnote.

keyj’s blog gives more information on the issues. In my opinion, Keynote does not seem something one can have a trademark on (probably Apple Keynote is their trademark, and I can’t see how using the keyjnote was infringing on it). Second, keyj is the nick of the author of the software, so there is even more rationale for using the keyjnote name than it looks like. Third, what has done the Apple lawyer team sent as cease and desist to motivate closure of the sourceforge site (with loosage of the code history) and mostly every trace of the package?

Barring an answer from the former main developer, we can only speculate. But I don’t like companies that use lawyers to destroy our commons, and the code history is one such common. For the moment the current version is still available, and now the repository, being distributed (accentuate.git) is more difficult to destroy. I hope Apple can make a public statement about why they contribute to destruction of the commons and the former main developer can tell us more and maybe even help us reconstruct a code repository.

Lessons: go distributed, go distributed, go distributed. Ah, and get a good legal umbrella or they will screw you even when they use a dictionary word as a trademark. Another lesson that Apple might extract from this issue if we all are diligent enough to stop buying their products and put some effort to destroy their brand is that one should not mess with freedom using the strength of their lawyers. But I think most people would rather look at their shiny logos than at their dubious legal practices.