Drupal Community Support Is Now Upside Down

Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has made some copryright changes that are now pissing off the web community. The new trademark policy, indroduced at the end of August 2009, now forbids the registration of domains like drupalSucks.com, and any site using Drupal in the name now must fork over $$$$$. WTF? Its a baffling move from such a well known member of the community, who has prospered from the concept of free software, sharing and free expression.

…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. (source).

Unfortunately, these greedy assertions in a community that functions because of the freedom of expression, sharing and openness usually only serve to anger people so much as to go out and register domains like drupalSucks.com which they use to spread the word about what a stupid idea this is.

Fallout is starting already. Free Drupal Hosting which, like the name sounds, provides free hosting for drupal sites, may not be willing to do so in the future.

There are draconian restrictions on the use of the word ‘drupal’, which would require us to give up a good part of our income, the truth is that the income from the ads is so low that we barely make enough to pay for hosting and bandwidth. We would not mind that but we refuse to make a loss on this service because of a silly trademark, with restrictions that – if they weren’t so sad – border on the hilarious. (source).

Creating a domain name that uses a preexisting name in the case of drupalSucks.org is covered under ‘Nominative Use‘, as an affirmative defense to trademark infringement. The Drupal community will be set to scream long and loud over this. And companies who market their services using Drupal, making sites with Drupal, and companies that write code in the Drupal framework are bound to think twice about whether they want to use it due to these new restrictions.