Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 21:19:41 -0400 From: "Andrew C. Hornback" <achornback@worldnet.att.net> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, "Salvo Bartolotta" <bartequi@neomedia.it>, "P. U. (Uli) Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <001e01c15060$78643480$6600000a@columbia> In-Reply-To: <000001c14fd2$64ef10c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Ted > Mittelstaedt > Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 4:23 AM > To: Salvo Bartolotta; P. U. (Uli) Kruppa > Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > Subject: RE: Use of the UNIX Trademark [snip] > ><exercise for the reader> > >Try and imagine how far the world could have gone if such rules > as those for > >trademarks had applied to scientific research. In particular, > suppose each > >and every researcher had had to pay $MONEY in order to be > allowed to utilize > >eg Galileo's ideas, Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations[*], etc. > > > > This isn't fair. We (meaning the UNIX community, collectively) > voluntarily > chose to use the word UNIX, knowing full well that it was trademarked by > AT&T. (Trademarking the term UNIX was one of the first things that AT&T's > lawyers concerned themselves with about the operating system) While it's > a crying shame that TOG is totally uninterested in the success of the UNIX > paradigm against the Windows paradigm and isn't willing to allow the term > UNIX to be spread around, we frankly can't complain about it - > our brethern > in the Linux community didn't seem to have a problem coining the > term "Linux" > to refer to their OS. Something that might set you all off was just brought to my attention. Do you realize that The Open Group actually endorses Linux? If they didn't, why would they have allowed the use of their precious trademark on a Linux distribution? This is beginning to look VERY political. > Every industry has this problem. Xerox pulled back the term "Xerox" and > everyone shifted to use of the term "photocopy", Kleenex turned into > "bathroom tissue" and so forth. We already have a perfectly good generic > UNIX term - "BSD" that we ought to be using anyway. But, for the small group of people that understand what UNIX is, how many of them also understand that BSD is a form of UNIX? > What trademarking protects is the marketing and advertising efforts. > After all, how fair would it be for a company to manufacture a > tennis shoe, > slap the name "Nike" on it, and then do no marketing and > advertising of their > own and be able to suck off all the money that Nike spends marketing their > shoes. That's comparing apples and oranges. Nike is a brand of shoe. They don't own a trademark on the idea of a shoe. The TOG on the other hand, they own the rights to UNIX, but they don't own the rights to a brand. Whatever brand (FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux) that they get together with suddenly would become UNIX. It's a backwards correlation, Ted. --- Andy To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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