After receiving a formal osCommerce trademark in August from the UK's Intellectual Property Office, the new owner, eCommerce Ventures Ltd., began heavily enforcing usage of the mark. This lead to a groundswell of opposition by the osCommerce developer community and ultimately to a confidential agreement with the original founder to relinquish the mark.
On September 23, eCommerce Ventures stopped distributing its modified version of the software with the name osCommerce. While no written settlement was reached, the group said it was advised by Beck Greener (the UK legal counsel to osCommerce founder Harald Ponce de Leon), that his client was content with the measures the group had taken to meet his demands, and he would not be pursuing the matter any further.
Rhea Anthony, Managing Director of eCommerce Ventures Ltd., noted that legal counsel was engaged to represent Ponce de Leon and not an organization named osCommerce, and that the negotiations were between Ponce de Leon representing his personal ownership of the mark. eCommerce Ventures has agreed to file a form with the UK IPO by October 13, and thus relinquish its legal right to the osCommerce trade mark registration.
During the negotiations, Ponce de Leon applied for a broad Trademark (in the European Community) in his own personal name as a "Physical Person," and not in the name of the original osCommerce group or other legal entity. The next day, Ponce de Leon recorded a flurry of solo software development activity on the osCommerce development site.
Regarding the trademark surrender, Managing Director Anthony said, "In order to come to a settlement short of going to court, which would have benefited no one, we have switched to using our osQuantum domains, removed our main osCommerce downloads, and will cede our osCommerce trademark back to the IPO within the next weeks. We will continue to provide support for osCommerce issues, but as time moves on and osQuantum develops the forums, we will concentrate on osQuantum."
A Little osCommerce History
The original osCommerce developers have been nearly dormant for the past several years and have not made a major public release in eight years. Founder and leader Harald Ponce de Leon had been absent from moderating his own community forum for nearly a year and, as a result, the forum had become a mass of porn spam. The group's tumultuous history includes teams of developers resigning from Ponce de Leon's heavy-handed leadership.
No work had been documented on osCommerce MS3 for the last two years until the New osCommerce Project was founded last November, and the new group quickly completed the long-moribund oscommerce MS2.2. The rapid completion appeared to renew Ponce de Leon's interest in the original osCommerce, leading to his release of an MS3 Alpha 5 release this past March.
In April the splinter group decided to completely rebrand the new cart as soon as the new name was decided. In June the team formally abandoned its previous plans to complete osCommerce 3.0 and 4.0. Instead, it decided to build a whole new cart, named osQuantum, using a php framework called Kohana. After the brief period of ostensible osCommerce trademark ownership, and its subsequent agreement to relinquish it, the group changed its domain name to osquantum.org and has scheduled the first release of their new software for January, 2010.
Who Owns "osCommerce"?
The osCommerce community has had little reaction to Ponce de Leon's application for the trademark in his personal name. Much of the ongoing divisiveness between the founder and his volunteer teams of developers has reportedly had to do with promises of team ownership, while legal ownership remains unclear or in Ponce de Leon's name.
The formal EU trademark application by Ponce de Leon may be viewed at http://oami.europa.eu/
New Developments on osCommerce
On September 9, the day after filing for the trademark in his name, Ponce de Leon posted on the osCommerce development site a flurry of activity showing add-on development for osCommerce version v2.2 Release Candidate 2a. The screen shots and text describe use in the osCommerce Admin of Yubikey, a strong authentication method contained within a USB device that generates a one-time password for powerful security. Yubikey is strong, two-factor authentication for osCommerce administrator accounts that can be optionally made available to store customer accounts. Security has been a major complaint against osCommerce in recent years.
osCommerce MS3 development appears to have languished during the legal negotiations, and even earlier. Since the March release of Alpha 5, all of the bug reports except two are listed as open, unresolved and unassigned. At the time of release Ponce de Leon assigned ten bug reports to himself, resolved them, then made the release.
Domain Names Under Scrutiny
As of Oct. 1, the domain name "oscommerceproject.org" remained registered to the osCommerce Project with Rhea Anthony named as the individual. osCommerce.com is registered to osCommerce with Harald Ponce de Leon named as the individual. the sites osCommerce.net and osCommerce.org are registered by a German organization named Seijsener Freizeittechnik GmbH, with original osCommerce team member Jan Wildeboer named as the individual. If Ponce de Leon wins the EU trademark, he can assert his rights to these domain names and his dominion over other aspects of licensing the osCommerce mark.
Kerry Watson is a regular contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com, as well as a consultant and author of 14 books in the OSC industry including the new Third Edition of the osCommerce User Manual. Her Web site is osCommerceManuals.com.
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
