Facebook setzt Openbook unter Druck und erzwingt Namensänderung

Und wie­der hat das Netz eine David-gegen-Goli­ath-Geschich­te. Auf Druck von Face­book wird aus »Open­book« nun »Open­space«.

Auf Slack hat Open­book-Mas­ter­mind Joel heu­te sei­ne Mit­strei­ter informiert:

So… we just got cont­ac­ted by lawy­ers of Face­book in regards to the word »book« in our name.

Alt­hough our inten­ti­on was to use it in the sen­se of an open book, (»some­thing that is wide­ly or ful­ly known : a thing com­ple­te­ly free from mys­tery or con­ce­al­ment«), we suspec­ted they would­n’t let this go and had thought about doing some­thing about this for a long time already.

Almost a year ago, when I first told Phil Zim­mer­mann ( @prz ) about the pro­ject, he sug­gested ano­ther name: Openspace.

We thought it was gre­at, the name reflec­ted what we wan­ted to crea­te back then and what we want to crea­te today, an honest, trans­pa­rent and wel­co­ming space on the inter­net, but as we had press coming out every day and our hands tied buil­ding up the Kick­star­ter cam­paign, we deci­ded it was not via­ble to do it.

Times have chan­ged and we now we find our­sel­ves in a posi­ti­on whe­re chan­ging it seems to be the only way for­ward. We can’t afford (€) to go to court against FB.

Yes, we have all grown fami­li­ar with the name Open­book, it won’t be easy to see some­thing other ins­tead, but chan­ge can also be an oppor­tu­ni­ty for impro­ve­ment, a new begin­ning, one whe­re we break away from the stig­ma and expec­ta­ti­ons of FB, one whe­re peo­p­le are curious about the pro­ject, the why, what and how of it all.

I hope the situa­ti­on and the mea­su­res taken are understandable.

Let’s che­rish the past months as the begin­ning of some­thing spe­cial made only pos­si­ble by self-less indi­vi­du­als from more than 50 count­ries taking it on them­sel­ves to sol­ve a pres­sing issue in our socie­ty, and look into the future with opti­mism over the oppor­tu­ni­ties this chan­ge can bring.

Ob »Open­space« wirk­lich das letz­te Wort ist, war­ten wir mal gelas­sen ab. Könn­te ja sein, dass dage­gen auch noch jemand etwas hat. Dass Face­book oppo­niert, ist nicht wirk­lich über­ra­schend. Sich mit Men­lo Park anzu­le­gen , bräch­te zwar zwei­fel­los Image­punk­te, ansons­ten aber gar nichts.

Laut Joel wur­de die Domain openspace.social registriert.

Ansons­ten ist das Pro­jekt aus dem Alpha-Sta­di­um immer noch nicht her­aus. Intern spie­len sich die glei­chen Sachen ab, die ande­re Platt­for­men auch ken­nen. Admins ner­ven User. User atta­ckie­ren Admins. Admins schmei­ßen ent­nervt hin.

Lea­ve Face­book. Quit Insta­gram. Drop Whats­app. NOW.