I would say it is a pity there was a reaction from OpenCFD. What kind of reaction do you expect? They have reacted and made their point very clear.

The wiki is not affected up to now by the problems faced by the documentation project, probably because it existed before the introduction of the trademark policy (I'm just guessing).

I have just came back from a long vacation. And I sigh deeply when I see this post, it's the worst story I have ever heard from this forum.

There's not an easy solution now. The confusion is well presented by these posts:
As a PhD student too, I want to thank Holger (and Alberto) again for their initiative work!

Now I guess the most probable solution in a few years will depend on the Dev party, depend on what Dev party would response, i.e. Mr Jasak, whether he would like to rewrite some of the basic codes and code-structures and rename it as "Open-CFD-Toolbox" something like that. Hence to avoid the long going inevitable confict. (If I have the ability, I would spend one year to go this way.)

Yes, with fully respect to OpenCFD, their great jobs, I understand their claims. So, brothers, I think we have to admit that there won't be a good solution now from our users' side, so, I ask for Peace. Do not hurt. And try our best to be friends. The difficult situation was embedded in history since the early 1990s.

In my opinion, the present need, which is not public from our users' side, is the two corporations (OpenCFD and WIKKI) should discuss this more in a deep and long-range-planning way, and then give us an official "joint statement". That would be better, better, and better.

But unitil that happens, let's try to contribute to OpenFOAMWiki for now. This is good for all of us now.

Let's be very clear on this. Holger did all the job of creating the documentation project, the website, the graphics, and dealt with the costs of setting it up and, unfortunately, paying his lawyer. I simply provided some support to the initiative and one document. I think his merits are far bigger than mine, and I feel it's necessary to make this very clear.

To fork a project you technically do not need to change the code. You simply need to decide when forking, provide a motivation, and change the name and brands. The name you suggest is not suitable in any way: it containes one of the trademarks object of this discussion. One hyphen does not make any difference.

If possible, that's the solution. After all Holger tried to find an agreement for a while.

Again, if possible it would be OK. I'd suggest to search the forum for past discussion between those two parties to understand why I see it a very remote possibility.

The wiki has its place and its role, which is not to write formal and reviewed documentation, at least in my opinion. I personally won't contribute solvers guides to the wiki, since it is too complicated to give them the right structure and the desired readability. The wiki is OK to document single functionalities, provide examples of use, tutorials and so on. Formal documentation requires another format in my opinion, since you must explain the theory, provide the equations and the numerical details. Doing this in a wiki is painful, both to write and to read. A PDF created with LaTeX is much better: it can be easily saved, printed, edited and commented. The author has a fixed structure to follow, which helps consistency, and ensures graphical quality. Moreover, the wiki is unfortunately exposed to spam, and maintaining a rich documentation there does not look easy to me from this point of view too.

Just my two cents :D

Best,

I understand that OpenCFD has to defend its trademark but I believe Holger had the best of intentions when he setup the documentation project. Soon they might be suing all students that use the word openFOAM in their theses. :D

Where is this thread located, I cannot find it. Deleted?

They have to protect their trademark, that's well known to anybody. However FOAM is not a trademark, and cannot be a trademark, being a common term. The hostile actions continued also after the project was renamed removing the original trademark.

Please, let's not start with this kind of statements and keep the discussion serious. They clearly won't sue students who use the trademark in their theses.

The intent of this discussion is to make the community know what happened, and also to try to discuss again the possibilities to create a documentation project with OpenCFD(r).

Best,

It's not deleted, since you can write in it :D

It belongs to the main OpenFOAM(r) forum and regularly listed there.

Best,

My impression is, not OpenCFD is the real problem. The real problem is there is simply no documentation to put into any documentation project. There is no reason to stop the documentation project. Write your documentation, replace every occurrence of the-word-which-must-not-be-mentioned with some funny alias or just "*beep*", and we have no problem at all. What would help is if all authors agree on the same alias.

What is so difficult about using the Find&Replace-function of your favorite text editor?

I do not personally consider this a viable alternative to create a serious and long term initiative to document the code. I don't like to play this kind of games and I do not think it will be of any use to have a set of documents without a consistent structure, under a well organized project, referring to a code that cannot be named directly.

In my opinion, if there has to be a documentation project, it has to refer to the code name. I find it quite useless to document with artificial names, which would actually make the project harder to find and at the same time would mean ignoring the hostile behaviour we observed towards a community initiative without any kind of commercial or competitive interest.

On the other hand, I'm not the original author of the documentation project, and I'm involved only as user and author of some document. I'm supporting Holger because the documentation project is probably the best idea the community around the code had since its birth, and such a kind of initiative is exactly what this community needs.

At this point it would be important to know the opinions of community members, who know where OpenFOAM came from and how it evolved in these years. It would be as well important to know what kind of solution (if any) to this problem they would like, what kind of initiative they are willing to support and how.

P.S. The statement "there is no documentation to put in any project" is right only in part. It does not take long to document a good number of solvers if there is a structure to follow, and an infrastructure to check and provide the documents. Some documents are ready, and frankly all the time spent by us and OpenCFD(r) to discuss of these formal details could have been spent in a much more productive way, writing documents, on both sides.

Best,

Here I see a number of lame excuses.

You say you are author of one of the documents. Why don't you follow its structure, if it doesn't take long? Doesn't the wiki accept pdf documents?

An infrastructure will develop itself if some people provide documentation. Don't talk about the problems, work around them! I could contribute some documentation on the chemistry models, but I'm reluctant to share it with someone who provides an infrastructure without contents. In my opinion Holger did a great job, but I feel uncomfortable when I'm asked "Give me your work. I can distribute it for you".

Finally, I don't agree with you in this point. What I suggest is not to play the game with the other party. If all users who are interested in free access to both the software and documentation agree on a new name, the old name-which-must-not-be-used will soon be forgotten.

And, as a last word, I wonder how the trademark policy can coexist with the software under the GPL. The GPL allows us to distribute and modify the software, although the code includes many of the forbidden words. Instead of waiting for a solution for the documentation project name, how about supporting Holger with funding for a good lawyer to find out whether at least one of these strange policies is valid after all? Who else will contribute 50$ for this purpose?

Did you see the structure of a document in the documentation project? Reproducing it on the wiki is impossible, and I don't consider the wiki a good place for a collection of PDF's. That's not the point of a documentation project. I explained that already in other posts.

I disagree. The documentation project wants to provide reviewed documents with uniform quality. The infrastructure is extremely necessary to do that in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of work for who manages the project itself. In the past there were attempts to document the code without infrastructure, they failed. Simply check the discussion board and you'll find out.

Holger did not ask you to transfer the copyright. The licence was extremely clear. You are the owner of the document. You simply ensure the rights to redistribute it to the documentation project, nothing else. Nobody could change the document without going through a review process too.
Before submitting my document I carefully checked that. I do not really want a project with contributors who do not receive recognition or lose rights on their work myself.

What you are proposing is the fork option, if I get it right. It is one of the options under consideration.

You do not need a lawyer to find out that the trademark policy is compatible with GPL. I asked the Free Software Foundation, and they said it is. They were the ones suggesting a fork and a documentation project of the forked code. It might be useful to find out if it the policy can be extended to "foam" (it should not be).

Best,

This concern is really without any reason. The documentation was licensed under Free Documentation License 1.3 AND the copyright in the documentations stays completely with the authors and as a author your name would have been added to a contributor list within the document (together with its reviewer).

best,
Holger

Is it viable to "rename" XXX-dev code to the name that satisfies the trade mark policy and provide documentation to the renamed code?

I am aware that renaming should cover removing all prohibited words from the code. It should be automated.

The similar scheme is followed by CentOS Linux and Scientific Linux. They are based on a well known Linux distribution.

Frantisek

This is my one cent contribution
The Documentation Project For Poor Fluid Dynamicists
not even the devil dare challenge this name



..............................Open Source For Ever.............................................. ..............

Let's follow this way

It's the "fork" option discussed above. It is surely feasible, and it involves quite a lot of work to clean the code.

Formally the only part containing the trademarks are the file headers, the dictionaries and the solver startup messages. The namespace is "Foam", so it should not be a problem, since it is a common name and not a trademark. Of course if the new name will be, say openSMOKE (a friend suggested it :D), probably it might make sense to change the namespace to "Smoke" for consistency, and the solver names accordingly (simpleSmoke, pisoSmoke) .

Best,

What are we talking about when we say "fork"? Fork like XFree and XOrg, two parallel branches, like Debian and Ubuntu, the last based on the first constantly, or simply renaming all the code in every new version of OpenSOAP?
I know we've talked about FreeFOAM, but nobody explained the situation and utility of this fork. In fact we have in the web: OpenSOAP, OpenSOAP-dev and FreeSOAP, what about each one ot them, or at least the the last two ones?

Regards.

OpenFOAM(r) and OpenFOAM-dev are already two parallel branches: at each release the -dev version is recreated using the new version from OpenCFD(r), adding all the work done by H. J. and his coworkers and contributors. If the fork will be considered necessary, I think it should be discussed on how to do it.

About the naming, there are different opinions. Someone suggests to use "Foam", which cannot be a trademark, strictly speaking, being a common term. This has the clear advantage of not requiring any deep change to the code, and of maintaining compatibility with the code written by OpenCFD(r) for the same version.

Others, me included, think that whatever containing the word "Foam" might be questionable and lead to litigation, even if without actual legal foundation. That's why I would personally stay away from names that might remember the trademark. There are however problems with this choice, the most evident is that even without substantial changes, the code written by OpenCFD(r) would not directly be usable in general on the forked code.

All these details have to be discussed in case a fork becomes necessary.

To be fully transparent, correct, and avoid rushed decisions, I would suggest to give OpenCFD(r) some time (2 weeks?) to consider what is happening and eventually come out with a proposal to discuss of this with the community. This could be asked with an open letter from the community to OpenCFD(r), if the community agrees, as suggested by someone in private. What do you think?

Best,

If understood right, OpenCFD earns it income from support for and training in OpenFOAM. Then, is it possible they oppose these kind of project because they fear they will lose in sales? That is, they would like to keep the code a bit inaccessible and undocumented... Seems like a funny way of business in that case. Or is there any other obvious reason for their behavior?

Kalle