I get the feeling the culture in radio is just not the same as regular open source. The free unrestricted sharing of things is an unusual quirk in the world rather than the norm.

I don't know any of the players but I'd bet they're licensed amateur radio operators.

For now, I don't think it's fair to compare MeshCore with MeshTastic in terms of enforcement as that has not happened with MeshCore. This seems to be one guy getting a trademark in the UK without the approval of other members of the team. They're not going after anyone. Not yet, at least.

The protocol is CC and Mark has said go wild, it seems he doesn't want his work to contribute to an unstoppable AI killing machine networm

> What is it with mesh projects and having these super draconian trademark enforcers?

Simple. Follow the money. Meshcore has more than 100k of users, repeaters are cropping up like weeds across the world. And that means there is a serious incentive to "cash out".

Notably, the person "cashing out" here wasn't involved in Meshcore firmware or app development, but in marketing.

All meshtastic code is GPL, the name "meshtastic" is owned by the company that developed it. You can use any of the code, you can't use their name outside their rules. This is absolutely no different than, say, Firefox. The trademark policy is very permissable and you don't even need their permission to use the name on a commercial product.

I think it's totally sensible for the organization to want to have some level of control over what gets their label on it -- the Wi-Fi people wouldn't be very happy about someone slapping their logo all over a bunch of completely incompatible hardware.