On August 28 2009 Dries Buytaert, the original author of the great open source CMS Drupal (which powers this site among other things), announced on his blog a new trademark policy for the software. We believe this policy does not accord with the spirit of free software: it says we should have asked them for permission to create this site! The clause may or may not stand up in court, but it's clearly there in the text. Other large open source projects don't do this, e.g. see the Linux trademark policy.
Of course we didn't actually ask for permission. The ball is now on the other side of the net: will Dries Buytaert initiate action against this site, ignore the alleged infringement, or amend the policy? Either choice will carry valuable information to the Drupal community. We also do not think that we are bound by an agreement that we have not explicitly consented to.
To make it absolutely clear that we do not agree with the policy we also registered drupalsucks.com, which the drupal trademark policy expressly forbids. That does not mean that we think that it really sucks (though, like every other piece of software on the planet it has its shortcomings), in fact it is a pretty impressive piece of software. But people should be free to criticize it in any way they see fit, including the registration of domain names that are less than flattering.
Another question to be answered are how the drupal foundation will work with parties that have already built up a business around the drupal name before this license was created.
Also see the discussions on Reddit and on Hacker News.
Jacques Mattheij, Vladimir Slepnev
