Forward, by Scott Powell

Many of you got into MeshCore because it answered an as-yet unknown call. The project had its beginnings here in late 2024, when I was frustrated that there was no sufficiently open and permissive mesh protocol which could form the centre of a vibrant ecosystem. From the start, I made my intentions clear, that I wanted an open protocol, an open source core engine, but also permissive of 3rd party products that could build on top of it. I then spent the next two months designing and writing what became the C++ MeshCore engine, and the 3 main firmware roles.

What I also made clear were the principles that project was founded on. What has been great to see is how MeshCore has attracted the right people, as many have noted and found the general spirit of conversations to be very positive and cooperative.

I believe its success has rested on two main pillars:

• technical pragmatism (eg. keep it simple)
• a positive and appropriate ethic for the times we’re in (eg. heavy gov/corp tracking and censorship)

As many of you know, a team split occurred earlier this year due to a steady erosion of trust, which culminated in a trademark filing that completely went behind the core team’s back. We are now on a war footing as every attempt from us to come to an understanding has been met with contempt by the former member.

All of this could have been avoided with one simple email from him: to state his intentions upon winning the legal mark. That’s it. I’ve made my intentions for MeshCore widely known, but the former member prefers to hide his intentions (and his methods). Part of the huge backlash against him and his derived products is precisely because of his lack of openness. He has plenty of time to rebrand even the latest MeshCore releases, modify them, promote them as his own, but he doesn’t even have time to send us, the core team, a single email?

And the irony is he primarily wants to steer people from the MeshCore brand to his own brand! MeshCore is simply a stepping stone, yet he still has shown no intention of dropping the trademark filing. It begs the question, why?

As a result, we have burned countless days and dollars mounting a legal challenge. This has been very draining, and has been hurting the project. PR’s pile up, and features we’d hoped to have done by now still haven’t been touched. So, we need to get this behind us and get the project back on track.

But, for the next phase, we need your help.

We are approaching the pointy end of the legals, with a deadline looming, and crossing the next threshold is going to cost a lot, so we’re asking for help. The details will be explained further in this post, by Liam and the rest of the team.

I just want to get back to where we keep pushing where MeshCore is going, innovating and seeing just what is possible with a community-run mesh. We have SO much still to do! And hopefully we’ll be back on track again soon.

warm regards,

Scott

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Timeline Summary

We’ve included some key information from the timeline of events relating to this dispute below. For the purposes of the timeline, we refer to the former team member as AK.

• 16/Nov/2024 Scott shares blog post announcing his plans to work on MeshCore.
• 20/Jan/2025 Scott publishes his open source MeshCore project on GitHub.
• (things are going well for more than 1 year, with a thriving community)
• (trust with AK was starting to erode)
• (some internal disagreements came up)
• 29/Mar/2026 AK secretly files for UK trademark.
• 03/Apr/2026 We confronted AK on the filings. Conversation broke down with no resolution.
• 10/Apr/2026 Liam and Scott start New Zealand company “MeshCore Technologies Limited”.
• 11/Apr/2026 We file for MeshCore logo trademark in New Zealand.
• 20/Apr/2026 AK secretly files for EU trademark.
• 23/Apr/2026 We announce team split.
• 25/Apr/2026 We start engagements with legal counsel.
• 06/May/2026 We file for logo trademark in Australia.
• 06/May/2026 We file for word trademark in Australia, New Zealand, United States and China.
• 07/May/2026 We ask AK (again) to withdraw the UK/EU trademarks.
• 07/May/2026 AK responds saying he won’t withdraw the UK/EU trademark applications.
• 08/May/2026 AK says we will need to form some sort of commercial agreement with him.
• 09/May/2026 We ask AK for a proposal around trademark rights. He says he’ll have a think about it and get back to us.
• 19/May/2026 We follow up via email and discord asking again, about a proposal around the trademarks.
• 04/Jun/2026 We file for subsequent international designations for word trademark in Canada, Switzerland, European Union and United Kingdom.
• 12/Jun/2026 Our lawyers send notice of threatened opposition and extend UK trademark opposition period from 17/June/2026 to 17/July/2026.
• 18/Jun/2026 Our lawyers send demand letter to AK. (alleges copyright infringement, stolen assets, and tool cloning, which can be seen in file names and api responses of .uk site)
• 24/Jun/2026 AK responds to our demand letter. (denies any wrong doing or bad faith, refusing all desist orders)
• 25/Jun/2026 We reach out to AK one more time via email and discord, giving him another opportunity to provide us with a proposal around the trademarks, however received no reply.

Why Not Just Rename?

We know some of you might be thinking, “Why not just rename the project and move on?”

The short answer is, we shouldn’t have to. We came up with the name, hand crafted the firmware and are still the original core maintainers of the project.

It also sets a dangerous precedent, that if an open source project simply folds and rebrands every time a bad faith actor tries to claim a trademark, it signals that open source developers can always be bullied out of their own hard work.

So instead, we are choosing to stand our ground and fight for the name we earned, and for the future of the project and our community.

If AK becomes successful in registering the trademark, all it will do is fracture an already well established, global ecosystem. It doesn’t make sense why he’s still pursuing this, especially after the massive backlash from the community.

Keeping the Core Human & Open Source

This fight also highlights exactly where things are headed if AK gets control of the name.

While some of the apps/clients in our ecosystem may be closed source, our core firmware and libraries have always been strictly open source, and written by humans.

AK’s version proves his trajectory, taking open source community code, feeding it to an AI, locking it down, and making it closed source, for profit.

Supporting us in this fight is a vote to keep the core firmware free, open, and community driven.

The Next Step

So, now we’re facing the expensive part of all this…

Unfortunately, AK is forcing this with his refusal to provide any workable resolution to this conflict.

As we are getting closer to the deadline, we now need to push ahead with legal opposition of the trademarks. At this stage, we’ve only extended the deadline for submitting our opposition arguments. Should AK try to defend the opposition, we plan to proceed with prosecution through the courts.

We have been given some estimated costs by our lawyers, totalling around $18,000 USD.

• ~$3,000 USD - Legal fees to oppose the UK trademark application.
• ~$9,000 USD - Legal fees to proceed to prosecution if the UK trademark opposition is defended.
• ~$6,000 USD - Legal fees to file an invalidation action for the EU trademark.

In addition to this, we have already personally covered more than $15,000 towards counter-trademark filings (in other jurisdictions), legal fees and extension of opposition deadlines.

Nearly all five of the core team members do MeshCore work part time. And up until recently, the project has had no central revenue earning capability (unlike similar projects like Meshtastic).

Because of this, the project is very underfunded. However, none of us have really minded. We do the work because we want to see it succeed.

Very recently, we started a GitHub Sponsors page, and it’s been great to see so many of you donate to us.

As this hasn’t been running for very long, unfortunately we haven’t accrued anywhere near enough to cover the legal costs. So we’ve now started a crowd funding campaign, in an attempt to raise the required funds to continue the legal challenge.

We are now asking the MeshCore community for any support you may be able to provide us in our fight to protect the MeshCore project’s name and future. Any contribution you are able to provide will be greatly appreciated.

What Happens If We Win

If we win the legal opposition, we will need to start a process to get consensus on what the trademark (and logo) ‘fair use’ policy should be. We would be looking for suggestions from the community, and would reach out for comments when we get to that stage.

We’ve always had a pretty liberal attitude to the use of the name and logo, but we will have to have some formal rules around it, and a means to prohibit any ‘bad faith’ or abusive uses.

Other than that, the project would continue as normal. Instead of dealing with this legal dispute, we’d have more time to put toward working through our growing pile of feature requests!

What Happens If Challenge Is Not Viable

In the event that the trademark opposition is unsuccessful and a prosecution through the courts is not viable, say due to insufficient funding, we would pool any raised funds into the GitHub Sponsors fund, with plans for it to benefit the MeshCore community directly.

We’ve wanted to establish things like bug bounties, and some way of rewarding the top contributors after each release. These funds could end up at least helping the future of the project in more practical ways, by helping the efforts be more sustainable.

So far, from our generous sponsors, we have accrued around ~$1,800.

Our Final Request to Andy

Andy, if you’re reading this, we urge you to withdraw your trademark applications. Please consider the long term health and future of the MeshCore project, and bring this dispute to a close.

All it takes is a quick email to the trademark offices requesting the withdrawal of your filings. If you do that, we will drop our legal challenges, and we can all move on, allowing us more time and energy for the project.

Otherwise, we have compiled all necessary evidence, and are fully prepared to push forward with defending our open source project.

Help Support the MeshCore Team

If you’d like to help support the MeshCore project, please consider donating through our links below.

• Crowd Funding Campaign: https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/help-us-save-meshcore
• GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/meshcore-dev/

Even if you’re unable to contribute financially, sharing this post will help us tremendously.

We appreciate all the support we can get.

The MeshCore Team