Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 01:22:39 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "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: <000001c14fd2$64ef10c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <1002388927.3bbf3dbf4db45@webmail.neomedia.it>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>-----Original Message----- >From: Salvo Bartolotta [mailto:bartequi@neomedia.it] >Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 10:22 AM >To: P. U. (Uli) Kruppa >Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt; freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: RE: Use of the UNIX Trademark > > >[ This is WAY OT for -questions. My apologies. I usually refrain. :-) ] > Actually, no it isn't. Despite what some would like to believe, FreeBSD is comprised of the community of users, not only the core. Marketing and positioning of the FreeBSD "brand" is a legitimate topic of consideration of the general user community. BSDI/Walnut Creek once upon a time did have a moral claim on a lot of this - but they gave that up when they sold out to WindRiver, and WindRiver appears totally uninterested in the FreeBSD branding issues. Whether we want to make an issue of this UNIX naming business is as much our problem to consider as it is the core's problem. > ><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. 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. 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. Consider also that this works both ways too. For example, Sun cannot use the term "Linux" to refer to their Solaris operating system, and thus cannot benefit by the grass-roots advertising and marketing done to promote Linux. How would you like it if IBM decided to label one of their AIX UNIX releases "The FreeBSD revision of AIX" and thus start confusing all the newbies that are just getting into using FreeBSD? And as far as Maxwell's equations are concerned, that's patent law, not trademarking, and yes it's a big problem these days as willy-nilly patenting is creating a problem for scientific researchers. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?000001c14fd2$64ef10c0$1401a8c0>