Re: "wireguard" implementation improperly merged and needs revert

[nia <nia%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

The best way to have avoided this would have been to do some
research into how NetBSD is developed - asking for a revert doesn't
make sense and was bound to produce a flame war.

It's turned off in default builds, we're far off a stable release,
this code has been around for years already, etc etc. Developers should
have been contacted directly with any concerns, rather than this
being crossposted to 3 of our lists.

On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 06:24:54PM +0200, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> Huh? What's a trademark have anything to do with this at all? The name
> is trademarked so that some rogue company doesn't make "wireguard
> antivirus" or something and confuse the heck out of everyone, the same
> way that "Linux" is trademarked by Linus, and the way that "NetBSD" is
> trademarked by the NetBSD Foundation. It's not something meant to have
> any effect on projects like NetBSD, let alone those I have immense
> respect for, again like NetBSD. So, please leave that stuff out of it.
> It's really entirely unrelated, a red herring, and something that's
> sure to kick up lots of flames here without good reason.
> 
> No, this discussion here is motivated by precisely the opposite
> concern: I *care* about NetBSD, and I want it to have an
> implementation that I would be proud to send WireGuard users to use,
> and encourage people to build things on, and hold it up and say, "this
> here is a WireGuard implementation; use it!" I observed that the haste
> of the integration here is not likely to yield that result, so I'm
> asking to put the breaks on, and volunteering my development time to
> make that happen.
> 
> So, before you direct others to go crazy with the legal-baiting,
> please consider that this is motivated out of a respect for the NetBSD
> project, not some other weird motivation involving trademark law.
> 
> Jason

We went down this road because of your usage of the word ""wireguard""
(in quote marks). Combined with some casual reading of the Wireguard
trademark policy, it makes it seem like you do not believe things
may call themselves Wireguard until you are personally happy with
them (or are involved with them in some way).

The NetBSD trademark exists to stop people from selling branded
NetBSD merchandise with nothing going back to the Foundation, and
similar situations. There are reimplementations of NetBSD APIs
such as in MINIX and it would not make sense to restrict those
from referencing NetBSD(tm) in their documentation or source code.