Study for finals for a week and then things like this happen… I think this is really strange, and not really needed at this time. The community know the reputable vendors that they can buy VESC’s from, and we know the firmwares coming from vedder are legit, and the rest are use at your own risk.
At the end of the day, 95% of VESC’s sold will not come from trampa. So the community basically pays the price so that Trampa can secure the name and not have to deal with a few potential problems.
But heres the problem: a name isn’t going to stop people from abusing the designs, spreading malware, ect. People can still put malware ect. into the firmware, and release it somewheres. You think criminals care about the copyright law?
If your worried about the malware issue for example, have vedder release all the software you need for the VESC through his website, and refer people to only download from him. This issue for example can be solved in better ways that aren’t at the price of the community.
What changing the name will do is confuse the community, make it harder for us to talk about the VESC (since we need to refer to some other name that seems like it’ll be way longer, based on your suggested use Trampa), and in general, inconvenience the community. I don’t see, through your explanation trampa, how you’ll secure the project like this. I think we’re over that hump in this project to where someone could successfully hijack it. Too many people know the right people in the game to buy them from that aren’t ripping offer vedder or the project.
The biggest gain is really Trampa’s gain, which is now they have exclusivity to a name the community has used for almost 3 years now to refer to this project. All of the SEO gains of having thousands of pages talking about it, the familiarity to the name, ect, will benefit Trampa, at the cost of the community.
Unless you can show us direct proof that this project is in such grave danger, by showing us the bad actors that want to hurt it, and show that even a bad actor at this point could dismantle and tarnish the project, it seems this was done for monetary gain in Trampas interest. If you want to protect the project ect, why not give it a new name and protect that? Why upend the community like this? You will piss off (and have pissed off) a lot of potential customers.
I;m no lawyer, but as a Software Engineer, Copyright laws are a pain in the butt, that stifle development and progress. I think if you really thought about this problem from a CS standpoint, you’d see how to secure the project without the need of getting Copyrights involved.