> I have registered my existing trademark on the Bundler project.

Can someone familiar with trademark law comment on this? If I understand this post correctly, there was a merger between Ruby Together and Ruby Central at some point in the past. The combined organization was paying for some combination of developer time and server costs for the project.

Can an individual member of this merger actually go register the trademark for the project name and claim that it belongs only to them after merging the organizations and working on the project together, including financial contributions? Is this a loophole situation where neglecting to register a trademark for the group organization left an opening for someone (who is a member of the combined organization) to come in and scoop the trademark registration for themself later? After a decade of the word being used generically by the community, can anyone suddenly trademark it and claim it wasn’t a generic term at this point? Have I misunderstood something about the order of events or nature of the merger?

Seems like this is the reply you wanted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372303