Yeah. My comments are from before Alvaro started commenting in this thread, and I've since changed my position based on reading his responses.

> He also seems to be interested in leveraging the trademarks to force governance changes on the core team and PGCAC.

This is it. The strategy was to acquire the trademarks and then use them as leverage to force the dissolution of Postgres Core and its associated organizations, to be replaced with a new power structure which includes him as a key member.

The very last part is me editorializing somewhat (although it's not very much of a stretch), but he's been quite explicit about the rest of it.

It seems like an necessarily combative headline that conflates your relatively unknown non-profit with the whole community.

If your goal is genuinely to improve the legal and governence situation of the postgres community, this seems to be am extremely poor way of doing that.

Getting some arduino.cc vs arduino.org vibes here.

I've used the LKML to contribute changes, and I'm also an amateur radio operator. I guess that makes me a fossil.

Ok, what would you suggest in it's place?

In Spain, a Foundation is a very strong legal entity scrutinized by the Ministry of Justice. This means, among other things, that:

* Every action of its board is supervised by the Ministry of Justice. * No action or change to the status can go against the initial will (which is part of the Estatutes, in particular Articles 3 and 4). Even if anyone would try to change them, they could only be done in a way that respects them. This is what is called "the founder's will".

So it's a very protective non-profit, which always needs to serve the public good and the founder's wills, which are Articles 3 and 4. And there's even public supervision for this.

We believed this form of a non-profit is much stronger and better to protect a Community like Postgres from potential rogue actors.

As an aside, we contemplate honorary (non-voting) members. We believe is a good thing. I'd also propose the same for Core --I believe at least Bruce Momjian should be named as such.

> ... or didn't respond in time to inquiries from Spain officials, it looks to me like the system (at least in Spain?) does not work.

As a rule you will not be contacted by the relevant trademark registering office. What happens is that the registration filing is published, and if you are opposed to it going through you will need to file opposition within a certain period after the publication.

That's why organisations with IP to protect typically directly or indirectly (that is via counsel) use trademark watching services. Essentially these scan the where ever the filings are published, and will send you alerts or whatever when something turns up on the radar.

Actually filing opposition is rather tedious and expensive, and particularly when different good/service classes are being used, sometimes difficult to actually be successful with.

I agree that we need to enhance the website and give more visibility to the people behind the foundation. We will do so shortly.

Yet this is public (as in the public registries).

Please contact us if you want further information.

Sure. Fundación PostgreSQL co-founder and current President.

In your longer response https://postgresql.fund/blog/postgres-core-team-attacks-post... you say that the advantage of the Fundación over the core team is that it is protects against PostgreSQL being acquired:

> In other words: a PostgreSQL association may be turned into a cooking, or into an Oracle association; whereas Fundación PostgreSQL will always remain a PostgreSQL nonprofit, for the sole benefit of the PostgreSQL Community.

and

> If one of the main resilience strategies of the PostgreSQL Community is to have a distributed IP strategy, which protects it from being bought, why is one part of the Community legally threatening another part?

But I do not see anything in Articles 3 and 4 that addresses this. Suppose a majority of PostgreSQL developers were to accept job offers from Oracle and the Core Team decided to rebrand it as "Oracle PostgreSQL". I don't see anything in Articles 3 and 4 that would prevent the Fundación from recognizing Oracle PostgreSQL as the legitimate / real PostgreSQL. It simply talks about "the Open Source software known as PostgreSQL (www.postgresql.org)", and as you know, Oracle's MySQL is still known as "MySQL" and still is at www.mysql.org.

In fact, Articles 3 and 4 would obligate the Fundación to support Oracle, to contribute to Oracle, to assign copyright to Oracle if they added that requirement (the Fundación is required to contribute to PostgreSQL, and there is no clause saying "unless it requires assigning copyright"), to promote Oracle PostgreSQL, and so forth. Right?

That is to say, it seems to me that it is an advantage that PEU and PAC do not have any such commitment to stick with whoever happens to call themselves "PostgreSQL" today, and a disadvantage that the Fundación must convince the Ministry of Justice that Oracle's leadership of MySQL (which has been fine, not great but certainly MySQL is a usable product) has actually been so bad that the founding documents need to be changed.

(I am not much of a Postgres user, and I know basically nothing of how it runs, and I also know nothing of Spanish law, so I'm definitely not trying to say that you're wrong and they're right. I'm just trying to understand what your claim is and how it works.)

So the downvotes on your perfectly legitimate comment are absurd, but here we are.

To get technical, the problem that you're having isn't that interacting with mailing lists is cumbersome, but rather, interacting with mailing list archives is cumbersome. You're not wrong. Web interfaces for mailing list archives haven't really changed in yonks, and there's little incentive to do so. The only people who use the archives are the people who explicitly do not interact with the list itself.

The people who actually use mailing lists, are members of the list itself, and receive the messages in their mailbox. From that point onwards, their interaction with the mailing list is only as cumbersome as their Mail User Agent (email client, MUA). Using a decent MUA that supports threading is step one to having an enjoyable experience with a mailing list.

Unfortunately, in 2021, we've regressed from a world where we have depth of options where it comes to MUAs, to where we are now where the vast majority use webmail solutions exclusively. Webmail has definitely improved since the 90s and 00s, but unfortunately not every feature has come along for the ride, making that also tricky.

As far as the barriers to entry go, thats subjective. Subscribing to a subreddit requires creating a reddit account. Subscribing to most forums requires signing up with an email address, password, possibly username as well, along with other biographical details (optional in some cases), and validating your email is real. Subscribing to a mailing list requires signing up with an email address and validating your email is real.

Anything you're not used to using, is always going to feel more cumbersome. If "happy mailman day" doesn't mean anything to you, you probably haven't had much experience with mailing lists (or have, but much more recent).

With the amount of people who don't care about the difference between 10ns and 10ms calling themselves developers, I'm sure even Clippy would be the perfect IDE for some of them, so that's not saying much. Apart from the lack of nesting, Discord and other instant messengers are way worse at creating a searchable archive, the best option AFAIK is to export the chat with third-party tools that break the TOS.. an option so bad, it's not even an option.

I don't think discord or slack is a great alternative as it is very ephemeral (and not really open source / decentralized) but I do think interacting with a mailing list is worse than a threaded forum type layout.

Yes I'm a bit confused about their motivations too. Sharing what I've pieced together so far (and trying to approach this from a good-faith perspective):

My understanding so far is that they run a Postgres consulting firm [1], and it appears they took the liberty of registering a Postgres trademark for the class of "professional services" in order to (I presume) protect fair use by their firm and (they claim in their response) by others in the Postgres community.

Some of this is admittedly speculation on my part, and I'm trying to take a charitable view of their actions to try to understand why a community member would do this.

That said I have no opinion on whether this action is net good for the community, and I'm not a Postgres user so I have no horse in this race. It's just the social dynamics of this situation that are interesting to me.

[1]: https://ongres.com/about-us/#team

Feels a lot like the Freenode story. Still not sure what the endgame is/was there either, but the outcome certainly wasn't great for the community.

> Email has never had explicit threading

The "In-Reply-To" header is described in rfc2822. It is an explicit header in the RFC that is how you create threads.

Every mail client I've used correctly understands how to thread reply-chains using In-Reply-To.

The thing you're talking about, steam receipts grouping, is not a feature of email, but a specific feature of gmail's web view which is not mandated by any RFC and indeed is not explicit threading...

But there is a real way to thread which is defined in the RFC, and if you use a reasonable email client (aka not gmail), every mailing list's threading will work for you.

You've been downvoted but I believe your post is accurate. At least with regards to IMAP and any RFCs I've read myself, though I'm open to hearing from others. Much of email is absolutely implemented in client-side 'de-facto' ways.

edit: I see now in the RFC that there is a description.

But no one is looking at the register, you are supposed to remind everyone what you put in there every time it's relevant. This is a very unusual way to use a register...

I have been a PostgreSQL hacker since 2008 and a PostgreSQL user for many years before that. The first mention of my name in the PostgreSQL commit log is in 2003, and the first version of PostgreSQL that I used was 7.something; it couldn't drop columns yet.

Now that doesn't mean that I know every person who does good work on behalf of PostgreSQL, but it does mean that I expect to recognize the names of most people who have been involved in the project to a significant degree. And the only one of those names I recognize is yours.

I tried a quick Google search of each name with "site:postgresql.org" and the only one of those names that gets any hits is, again, yours. That means that, as far as Google knows, not a single one of those people has posted even a single message to any PostgreSQL mailing list ever. Needless to say, that's not close to true for any current member of the PostgreSQL core team, or a vast number of people who are not on the core team but who are involved in the project to greater or lesser extents.

It is true that the PostgreSQL community is distributed, and not everything happens or is required to happen on postgresql.org. But I think it is nevertheless extremely difficult to argue that a group of people who have never posted there even once are a more legitimate group to be in charge of PostgreSQL's trademarks than the PostgreSQL core team.

> Rubén J. Bravo, Manuel Argiz, César Calvo Pinilla, Alberto Picón

What companies do they work for?

I really doubt that’s true. It would mean that a foundation that owns any goods (buildings, rolling stock, etc.) would not be able to sell them, ever, except to other non-profits.

Are there any non-profit car wrecking companies in Spain?

GH issues does not fan out into contextual threads. That makes it a nonstarter.

> The correct way to go about that is not to make the holding entity and then try to surreptitiously acquire the trademark, but to have approached the community first. Did you approach the community prior to attempting to take over an aspect of their management and holdings, or not? If you did, what was the response?

Yes, this is the case. Indeed, many times. I have personally voiced many concerns about different aspects of the governance and workings of the Community. And in 2019 a very clear and significant case was raised when some dispute over IP (a domain name) surfaced. In this case, we declined used of the domain name following Core's request, but raised --again-- concerns over the governance of Postgres.

The answer to all of these requests? Outright denial. Silence. Nada. There is no willing to change anything. Also one year later I voiced some of these concerns publicly (https://postgresql.fund/blog/is-it-time-to-modernize-postgre...). Same outcome.

So yes, I have at a personal level and we have at the Foundation level tried everything we believed could be done. And we perceived trademarks are more at risk with PAC and PEU than us, and we saw that some were not registered, so we proceeded to protect them and offer them openly to the Postgres Community (https://postgresql.fund/trademarks).

And as stated publicly, we're ready to transfer them to a single entity. It just can't be the current ones.

> Once the problem escalates to be a legal dispute, this is the only way communication can happen.

But there hasn't been any other previous communication. Our first notice from them, as detailed in the post, was from their lawyers.

So there has been no attempt on their side to come to even an amicable conversation. I offered that --but was denied.

> And honestly, even the domain name postgr.es is confusing.

That domain is held by PostreSQL Europe. So according to your argument, they shouldn't hold it.

> From the PostgreSQL EU website (as linked by you), these are their specific trademarks:

That they are more or less confusing is something I may agree with. But I don't see why it may change the subject matter: if the agreement would be that only a single entity would hold them, so be it. PEU can't definitely do that, under no circumstance.

"Funnily" enough, PEU is also one of the entities suing Fundación in the courts. Indeed, on the very first letter, as our post mentions, they are presented with PAC as if they were part of the same: "in representation of both the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada and PostgreSQL Europe ("individually and collectively")".

So your argument that PEU's are not confusing is not what is at stakes here. It is that two entities, unrelated and separated, want to be the steward of the trademarks in Postgres. And if a third one tries to help, covering some observed gaps, it is sued by both. That is potentially collusion.

> And I'm sorry, but the global stability of the Postgres project is far more important than whatever good intentions you had.

I agree. But then why https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/trademark-actions-agai... is posted publicly? If the matter is in the courts (as it is), why is it needed to bring it publicly? We're happy to defend ourselves in private and in the public if needed, but I don't see what they win by this, and I see how it goes against the whole Community.

I'm sure you have read in our post that "The PostgreSQL Association of Canada; Postgres Europe; and Fundación PostgreSQL will transfer, permanently and irrevocably, all domain names, trademarks and other IP assets to the new NPO. New, clear and non discretionary rules will be established to allow fair use of the PostgreSQL trademarks by any stakeholder.". So it's not that we're unwilling to transfer the trademarks to the "Community". It's just that we disagree what the governing bodies of that community should be, believing that the current ones are a great liability and need urgent reform.

Of course, they don't want reform, so they chose to bash us publicly when the matter is in the courts. Who's harming the Community then? Are the trademarks currently registered by Fundación not offered to the public, with indeed less restrictions than PAC and PEU's? (https://postgresql.fund/trademarks).

No, I mean the "rules" that would enable a NPO to be able to hold IP for the project. There are no rules for that, yet PostgreSQL Europe holds trademarks and domain names for the PostgreSQL project.

And nobody has asked them, neither sued them, for this. Indeed, PostgreSQL Europe joined together with Canada to sue Fundación.

But PostgreSQL Europe is no different from Fundación: just a Postgres NPO.

> That these two entities overlap so much is a very bad thing, and definitely a liability if things turn bad from a legal perspective.

You are the one that is filing confusing, duplicative trademark and servicemark claims that waste the community's time. You seem to be asking me to put that aside for a moment. But I'm not willing to do that for reasons that will be obvious to most people.

That page directly answers your question? It says "To become recognised as an NPO, the organisation must self-certify that they meet the criteria below, aimed at ensuring they meet the standards of openness expected in the PostgreSQL Community". The Fundación refuses to meet the standards outlined in this document, for example the standard that "The board of directors MUST be elected by the membership, and all members including any corporate members MUST have an equal vote."

(The page in question then also goes on to say "The PostgreSQL Core Team may recognise, not recognise, or rescind a previous recognition of any organisation without justification, regardless of whether or not the criteria above are met.", but that's irrelevant here because the baseline requirements are not even met)