The best laid plans...
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The Good
As unbelievable as it sounds, not rolling out the server code was actually the result of a good thing: namely this article at Inside Higher Ed. It's off the front page now, but Friday morning it was the top item. The article was very complimentary and seemed to nail all of the important points about Connexions. As several of our staff remarked, the author really seemed to "get it."
In light of that I decided to delay the production rollout. After all, we wouldn't want people to read a positive article on us only to follow the link and find a "Down for maintainance" message. As of this morning, over 675 people have come to our site from the article. Not bad.
The Bad
The bad was discovering that we have to rename all of our software because there's already a trademark on RISA held by RISA Technologies. Oh well, at least the owner was polite about it. And better to find out before we made a final open source release. Changing the name isn't too terrible an ordeal (we know we're bad at picking names anyway.) The biggest pain will be the class names in the code since we'll have to use module aliases to migrate any existing instantiated objects in the ZODB. Well, that and the fact that we'll have to delay the release. Again.
Trademark is concerned with consumer confusion; internal elements like class names are pretty much beyond the reach of trademark. In my decidedly non-expert opinion, of course.