Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 20:30:03 -0400 (EDT) From: gsutter@pobox.com To: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New name? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980413202413.19093L-100000@mph124b.rh.psu.edu> In-Reply-To: <3532AADE.CD8589C4@3skel.com>
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On Mon, 13 Apr 1998, Dan Janowski wrote: >Das Devaraj wrote: >> The FreeBSD community at large may not want to change the name, >> but some enterprising souls may repackage the same thing with a >> catchy name (since redistribution seems to be allowed) and make >> a few bucks. Any takers on this? :-) > >Redistribute it as?: > >BSD-x86 >A Berkeley Operating System >Development by FreeBSD > >Does this cause legal problems? DG? What are the >restrictions on 'Unix'? I believe UNIX belongs to AT&T. We can't call it that. BSD-x86 is very _very_ close to BSD/386, a copyright of BSDI. I doubt we'd get away with that either. The whole name-change idea is probably unsound. Repackaging under different names, in my mind, draws immediate comparisons to Linux, where they have Slackware, Caldera/Red Hat, Debian, and another handful of smaller distributions, all doing their own thing and succeeding very well at splintering Linux. One of FreeBSD's strengths, and one of the main reasons why I agreed to try it (instead of installing a Linux) was the single, unified distribution, where I could get "FreeBSD", not "Foo-Brand FreeBSD" or "Baz-Brand FreeBSD" or "Snarfnix-8088 by FreeBSD". We've got a good, appropriate, descriptive name for the OS and we're just starting to achieve significant name-recognition; let's keep it that way. Regards, GReg -- Gregory S. Sutter "How do I read this file?" mailto:gsutter@pobox.com "You uudecode it." http://www.pobox.com/~gsutter/ "I I I decode it?" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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