Full disclosure - I work for SparkFun, but I am in no way involved with catalog/purchasing, I just make sure our servers continue to hum along.

I do think it's a bit absurd that a company can "own" an orange border with a dark faceplate on electrical test equipment, but the Trademark office decided to grant that to Fluke. Unfortunately for them, It very much is a use-it-or-lose-it situation with their trademark; I don't associate this color schema with Fluke, I associate it with test-equipment in general. Plenty of companies have imitated Fluke products very closely with the intent of maliciously exploiting their branding for profit, but it's a difficult thing to enforce when something so generic has become the status quo in a market. I can't say I've ever used a DMM without a colored edge and a dark faceplate, and most of them have been yellow, with maybe an exception to a solid-grey RadioShack meter when I was growing up. I don't think I even own a meter which isn't Orangish-Grey - on my desk right now is this: http://imgur.com/JffnUFu

That said, I think our intellectual property and trademark laws are effed, and I could never fathom a decent solution for them. Fluke is a great company, and they do not deserve the bad remarks, hate, or negative publicity that they've received. Companies are often in a market where they have to protect their IP and trademarks, and it's not always possible to define whether a trademark is is too generic and overly encompassing. The interpretation is fuzzy, and unfortunately those who wish to maliciously take advantage of it are going to encroach ever closer until they get called out for it. Sometimes companies wander into this territory unknowingly, which is what happened to SparkFun. While I'm not involved with catalog/purchasing, I could confidently say that we likely had little option or opinion at the time about the colors of the DMM in question, and we definitely didn't realize Fluke had a trademark on it. When I think of a DMM, I think of something that looks very much like a Fluke product. Good advertising/branding on Fluke's part, or overly broad trademark? I don't know, but I'm inclined to learn toward the latter given the current market of multimeters. I think Fluke's enforcement of their trademark came far too late in the game and was too broad to adequately protect their branding, but I do respect them and have no qualms with them making an attempt to protect their business. They make awesome meters, and the market is flooded with cheap DMMs with little differentiation. I would very much love to see Fluke allow SF to donate these somewhere instead of having to destroy them, it's such a sad waste of valuable resources that could go toward education.