Grabbing for the Python name, a hosting firm gets bitten

Who wouldn’t want the sleek, muscular, menacing name “Python”? A small British hosting company, POBox Hosting, certainly did — and decided it had the right to apply the slithering appellation to its new cloud computing offering, Python Cloud. POBox felt justified because its trading arm, Veber, had inherited the domain python.co.uk from work done about a decade ago.

That didn’t sit well with the Python Software Foundation, a community-backed nonprofit based in the United States, which found itself in an escalating dispute with POBox over use of the Python name. The foundation asked for help in establishing that the Python trademark had been routinely used in Europe — and a legal dispute that might have been a regional sideshow in any other industry became an international incident when the global open source community came to the foundation’s aid.

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Give us back our snake

According to POBox CEO Tim Poultney, a massive worldwide reaction ensued. The company received thousands of emails, some of which he deemed “threatening.” POBox’s servers crumbled under the load as developers all over the map visited its websites after hearing about the case on Slashdot, YCombinator, Reddit, and in press coverage. While Poultney characterized this as a DDoS attack, at this writing he has not substantiated the allegation. The company responded by shuttering its Internet site (python.co.uk currently returns a 404 error) and withdrawing from Facebook and Twitter.

Poultney expressed anger at being targeted and blamed the foundation for intentionally causing the attack with its blog posting. He explained he regarded POBox as the victim in all this, threatened by an unresponsive U.S. corporation trying to get his family business to give away a treasured brand name he had been using for 17 years.

That “trading for 17 years” claim deserved investigation, so I took a look on Archive.org. His company bought the python.co.uk domain in 1997, offering “Python Internet Services” that year and again briefly in 2004 (trading as “CheapNet” in between). After 2004, the domain redirected to pobox.co.uk, although Tim told me customers could request a “@python.co.uk” email address. While the company may once have had products with the name, its new cloud service, launched at the start of 2012, seems to have been a fresh endeavor.

The “big American corporation” claim bears investigation, too. While POBox Hosting is a small business, the Python Software Foundation — though it represents the interests of millions of developers worldwide — is even smaller. Chairman Van Lindberg told me, “The PSF is a very small nonprofit. We have one full-time staff administrator and a part-time accountant. All the rest of us are unpaid — we have regular jobs that we do each day and we donate our time to the PSF.”

Taunting the reptile

Lindberg explained to me that the PSF had tolerated the use of the python.co.uk domain for email hosting, considering that the domain just redirected to Veber and POBox websites — unfortunate, yet unlikely to mislead the public. But at the start of 2012, the PSF heard that POBox intended to launch a product called “Python Cloud.” Alarms went off since Python is widely used in the cloud. The new product posed a real risk of confusing the public, so the PSF wrote to POBox in January 2012 asking it not to move forward, pointing out the PSF-registered U.S. trademark.

Instead of recognizing the potential for confusion and picking another name for its new cloud hosting product, POBox chose to argue the legal details of the trademark registration. In April 2012, it tried to counter the PSF objections by filing a Europe-wide trademark registration for a graphic prominently featuring the word “Python” in all the classes one might expect to see Python software protected.

Though POBox and the PSF had corresponded prior to the trademark filing, Poultney told me that the PSF had not responded to invitations to discuss the filing afterward. Lindberg explained that POBox had made an offer to remove “software” from the scope of the filing. This would have left a restriction on Python for all servers and Web services, which was unacceptable to the PSF and its members.

Poultney claimed he had been unaware until last week of the importance of Python to the open source community. That seems a remarkable statement. POBox uses Debian for its websites, it faces major competition from sites that use Python (such as Google App Engine), and it offers Linux hosting. Further, the PSF had corresponded with POBox in January 2012. Poultney confirmed that he’d not involved any technical staff in the decisions he’d made about the Python product brand and told me he regretted that, because it would probably have helped him understand the likely reaction to his trademark challenge.

Learning from the encounter

That reaction was huge and instructive. The PSF was clear with me that it had no intention of causing this and did not want anyone to take action other than providing evidence that could be used in objecting to the trademark filing. DDoS bullying solves nothing and is indefensible; the PSF agrees and has asked for calm. Still, immense reaction carries a clear message: Though open source foundations themselves may be small and relatively powerless, they often represent huge numbers of passionate and capable software developers worldwide.

Taking actions that show a lack of respect for those communities, especially if they have practical consequences, is unwise. In this case, POBox focused on the absolute legality of its actions, pressing its right to the domain name and the potential for defending its use of the Python name in court. In short, POBox focussed on control, but what mattered was influence. POBox offended both developers and business influencers for the hosting business the company seeks to address.

It seems likely POBox Hosting (not related to the U.S. company of the same name, who have come out on the side of the community) has accepted the painful lesson. Lindberg told me that the two parties are now in direct talks following the community reaction, though the PSF would still value help gathering trademark usage evidence in case talks break down. POBox subsidiary Veber has also removed mention of Python from its hosting page. For the rest of us, this brief and energetic incident bears testimony to the power of the global open source community.

This article, “Grabbing for the Python name, a hosting firm gets bitten,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.