Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 01:29:48 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: blk@skynet.be (Brad Knowles) Cc: Doug@gorean.org (Doug Barton), brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: This is stupid Message-ID: <200003170129.SAA20579@usr02.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <v04220802b4f6242bc86f@[194.78.235.226]> from "Brad Knowles" at Mar 16, 2000 06:42:31 AM
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> > Suffice it to say that I believe the trademark owning > > entity should be extremely discriminating in granting licenses to use the > > name, but that such licenses should be granted when the product being > > marketed will add value to the brand. > > Well said! > > > Let me add that I believe that the only way licenses could be > granted in this fashion would be for the FreeBSD Core Team (and > later, the FreeBSD Foundation) to actually see a copy of the product > in question, so that they can confirm for themselves that it does > actually meet their standards. They would also have to have certain > guarantees that the product as shipped would be the same product that > they have approved. > > If you're not willing to give them a copy beforehand, then you > have no right to complain about not being able to use the trademark. Blah blah blah. It's obvious to me that the real issues of this dicussion should be: 1) Use of a trademark derivative of "BSD", not "FreeBSD", so the FreeBSD foundation is out of the loop; this is purely a BSDI issue. 2) What pieces are part of a distribution of "FreeBSD", if there was great insistance on using a "FreeBSD" derived name, rather than a "BSD" derived name? As to question #1: The position Jordan took at the user group meeting was a unification under the "BSD" umbrella. I personally don't think this is going to have the value that everyone appears to think it's going to have. But some people do, and are obviously very emotionally attached to the idea of "FreeBSD Must Not Fork", and so want to use a "FreeBSD" derived name for another distribution. So on to question #2: The "image" argument is an obvious impediment. It implies that the vendor must start with a cruddy installer and user experience (read: non-graphical and targetted at a tech-head), and keep the BSD style "rc" files (which are anti-component in the extreme, since they can't imply dependency ordering, and can't be easily added to by way of drop-in or replacement components, and in general would not be useful for a vendor like Oracle looking to make an install script that made the database start/stop on system boot/halt). Is a post-install FreeBSD system that was installed with a different installer not a FreeBSD system? How can we have two installers -- the thing that the system boots into when it first boots on a new platform -- and have one of them be preferred over the other, based on the CDROM it lives on? How can we set it up so that they can compete, and "may the best installer win"? Not to inject any sense of history into this discussion, but the first time Brett brought this idea up, all he wanted to do was: 1) Have a different default installer 2) Install some components that weren't installed on a default FreeBSD installation, and could only be put on one with a custom install and a great deal of knowledge already under your belt 3) Add a default splash-screen 4) Default to a graphical login (I may have misremembered these last two) 5) Install some commercial add-on packages that didn't come with the Walnut Creek CDROM distribution, and weren't likely to make it in past the purists who feared a "dumbing down" of their beloved OS Does that make the OS not FreeBSD? The only point of conflict with his previously stated plans and the "FreeBSD is everything if you want the trademark" camp is to throw away the current installer. Personally, I think that if the current installer died the grim death tommorrow, it would not be too soon. And it would still be FreeBSD. Hell, it'd be FreeBSD++. I'll slink back to my hole, now. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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