The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is literally one of enabling creators, and when they went to mistakenly enforce their trademark, the community literally fell all over themselves to bite the hand that feeds them.

If you run a successful tech business, you can reasonability except hundreds of people to try to rip off your content, steal your API, demand access to your APIs, reappropriate your logos and designs, and outright steal and resell your content. The mobile app development market is notoriously subject to this trend.

I think it would be wise for those in this community to be aware that companies are daily trying to defend themselves against people that generally don't want to develop their own businesses, but ride on the coat-tails of others. The danger is a race to the bottom of dilution for the company brand and outright fraud for customers.

If Raspberry Pi or any other company does something like this, take a moment to maybe understand why they did it, and how something might have gone wrong before vilifying a company that literally contributes TONs of work to the creator community. There are many times when I wonder how participants here actually run or have built a company - this comment isn't to gatekeep, but to point out that it makes no sense for a creator community to act like this.

STATEMENT FROM PHILIP COLLIGAN ON RASPBERRY PI TRADEMARKS

Yesterday we sent a letter to a member of the Raspberry Pi community as part of our efforts to protect the Raspberry Pi trademark that was inconsistent with our values as a community organisation. We got it wrong and we have apologised to the valued community member who got the letter. We are undertaking a review of how we protect our trademark to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.

The letter was sent automatically to a small number of individuals responsible for social media accounts and websites that were identified by external legal advisers as possibly infringing our trademarks. It should never have been sent.

It is important that we take action to protect the Raspberry Pi trademarks, not least to protect the public from bad actors who deliberately misuse our brands to sell poor quality, rip off products.

We want to do that in a way that doesn’t undermine the use of the Raspberry Pi brands and trademarks by members of the fantastic Raspberry Pi community who share our educational mission and who do so much to bring it to life everyday.

If you have a question or concern about your use of the Raspberry Pi brand or trademarks, please get in touch with us at trademarks@raspberrypi.org.

  while (1) { 
    company_does_something_stupid();
    gets_caught();
    apologize();
    makes_promises();
    if (bankrupt)
        break;
  }

    > The letter was sent automatically
    (...)
    > that were identified by external legal advisers

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Trademark/CommunityLogo

I do hope Eben Upton weighs in on this, because whoever signed this off, it's a bad decision all round. Blaming trademark law is just a dishonest get-out-of-jail-free that big corporations use to justify belligerent bad-faith dealing. I hope the Raspberry Pi Foundation can show that it's different. This is not a good start.

They have also replied indicating something to this effect. https://twitter.com/Raspberry_Pi/status/1318494942478635009

"This letter was automatically sent to"

I suppose they could’ve done it with a little less ‘ultimatum’, but it looks like they _did_ reach out before unleashing anything else.

This is a letter from the foundation. I don't see any lawyers listed anywhere, and no indication that they have taken legal action.