There's some discussion at https://lwn.net/Articles/738046/#Comments https://lwn.net/Articles/738046/#Comments . One angle: a few weeks ago SFLC announced that

There's some discussion at https://lwn.net/Articles/738046/#Comments https://lwn.net/Articles/738046/#Comments . One angle: a few weeks ago SFLC announced that it's starting a programme to support individual free software projects creating their own legal entity, rather than using an umbrella organisation like SFC or SPI, and strongly implying that it believes the time for such umbrella organisations is past: https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2017/sep/21/new-era-nonprofits/ https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2017/sep/21/new-era-non... Someone on the LWN thread suggests that this means they're treating SFC as competition, explaining the trademark action. It occurs to me that it's also possible that SFLC wants SFC to stop existing for some other reason, and this new programme and the trademark action might be independent steps taken towards that end.