To be honest, this trademark policy/trust issue has been a big game stopper for me. As those who know me may know I have been a MODX CMS fan, written a good number of MODX beginner and intermediate tutorials on my personal coding blog and recorded a number of MODX video tutorials hosted on Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, as well as at
http://modxvideotutorials.com, which is one of my websites. I have responded to hundreds of comments and emails answering MODX questions from developers and end users alike who find me via my MODx tutorials, and I train and support MODX developers on a constant basis. I have also built and I manage many MODX sites. By my personal nature I prefer to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and remain out of political discussions, what-if discussions, heated exchanges, and arguments, and just keep plodding along doing what I do best.
However, when someone mentioned to me a while ago that I was violating the MODX trademark (which I wasn't even aware of, due to my aforementioned oblivious nature), I immediately went and read the policy and realized that indeed, by owning the modxvideotutorials.com domain name, I was violating the trademark. I was astounded. I bought, a long time ago, a couple more top level domain names with the word MODX in them *gasp* that I intended to use for teaching MODX and supporting MODX users. Because I use my personal coding blog for a bunch of other things, I foolishly thought having a blog with modx in the url would be more appealing and less confusing to people looking for modx knowledge (than to have it bundled with drupal and wordpress and etc tutorials). When my violation of trademark was exposed, the energy went out of my tutorial-writing screencast-recording sails. Needless to say, for that and many other reasons my support for MODX has waned over the months, not just because I think the trademark policy is counterproductive for a system that claims to be community focused, but also because I think the general direction and stance that MODX has taken towards the community hasn't been one of trust, or community friendly. I don't think this was necessarily intentional, but I think it's been the unfortunate outcome with a portion of the community. I could expand on that but I think others have articulated it quite well.
As redtoad said, you have to trust your community. It would be one thing if some random person out there registered a domain name with the words modx in it, but I think it's another thing altogether if it's an established community member with a proven track record of supporting MODX in one way or another, such as redtoad, and others.
I have absolute respect for Shaun and Jason and the hardcore dev work they've done giving us MODX, and for Ryan and Jay as MODX evangelists. I sort of understand where everyone is coming from. But, I think that there needs to be a reciprocal relationship of trusting the community, and letting us support MODX CMS the best way we can and know how, whether it's by developing extras, tutorials, offshoot modx websites (with disclaimers of course), or donating hard cash. You could even put standard text that needs to go in the footer of any website that supports MODX but is not part of the official site. I would happily post that on the modxvideotutorials.com site, or any other modxsomething.com site I think of building and launching. Don't you see, you can't utilize all the modx related domain names out there. And it's better if we as supportive community members do, because then there'll be a proliferation of MODX sites, promoting MODX, spreading the word. Allow us to do it. Allow us to register/own/use top level domain names with the word modx in them and you'll be surprised what an effect it will have on growing the MODX brand. Allow your community to help you grow.
And while I'm at it, may I say that trademarking the phrases: { “Future Proof.”, “Sleep Well at Night.” and “More Time for …” when replacing the ellipsis with an activity} is a purely draconian measure in my opinion. People use those phrases aalllll the time, how the heck can you trademark them?
There's a dearth of advanced but complete and easy to understand (not an oxymoron, trust me) MODX tuts out there. If there were more, perhaps you'd have more than two core devs? I bet there are developers out there who would willingly volunteer to be mentored by Shaun and Jason and join the core dev team, freeing you guys up to do other stuff. That's how projects like Drupal and WP have grown. In addition, you can offer enterprise support, taking on big clients with big projects, such as Silverstripe (the company) and Acquia do. There are times i get offered a project, I feel it's too big for me so I pass it on to someone else who feels it's too big... etc. Perhaps if you had a MODX Enterprise or whatever team (without the partnership thing) any of us could pass those kinds of projects on to you and maybe get a finders fee (or nothing at all) and you make the big bucks?
I do wish you all the best with Siphonlabs, but I think that if you focus on supporting the community the community will grow and support you organically. And you can do this without creating any exclusive groups or memberships that exclude the bulk of your community.
just my 2c, written in a bit of a hurry, forgive any typos or grammatical errors.
Quote from: redtoad at Apr 02, 2013, 01:56 PMI understand the trademark policy as MODX is fledgling and no doubt the Powers that Be felt they need to retain total control. However I can't help admitting that we didn't do as much in the tutorial writing arena as we would have had we been allowed to move forward with modxbeginners. It might have eventually become a full-time gig for us to write if we could have followed the content marketing model we wanted to pursue, with revenue from advertising. It is what it is, we won't pursue that path again even if it opens up. We've moved on.
I will say I know that not all the leaders agreed with the decision/policy.
All I will say about it is I've found trust to be more growth-inducing than not.
If you have a group of people who want to write about your product and promote it daily, you might let them.
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