Zooko,
This is really disappointing news. I have been a part of the Zcash project from the start and watched the growth of the Foundation from an idea into a real, functioning part of the community. Throughout that time, it has always been understood that ECC would keep it’s long-announced promise to share control of the trademark with the Foundation, to make sure that no party could abuse it. This promise was made on ECC’s website, and on stage at Zcon1. And the Foundation has spent a great deal of time and resources negotiating this.
Now, at a critical time when the community is debating the future direction for Zcash, that promise is being abandoned. And the timing could not be worse. The stated justification may be that the company wants to use an alternative governance model, but there’s a problem with this: that governance model doesn’t yet exist. It may not exist for some time. And in the interim, the company is proposing to break its longstanding promise to share control with the only other entity that does currently exist (i.e. Foundation), in exchange for a nebulous promise to share control with “some future hypothetical entity that may or may not come into being”. And that promise may turn out to be worthless as well.
I would urge you to reconsider this decision. Right now ECC is in a negotiation with the community, and a huge part of the question we are asking is: can ECC keep its promises? This decision tells us that the answer is: no. I think that’s a poor face to show to the people who have worked hard to make this project succeed.
ETA: Unfortunately, the immediate implication of this decision is that ECC will retain sole control of the trademark during a time when the company is asking the community to give it a substantial dev fund. The legal hammer this gives ECC really makes it much harder to have an open debate about how to construct such a fund, and frankly, makes me much more pessimistic on the idea of a dev fund in the first place.