[moving this discussion over to trademark-policy-dev]
Nicolas Dorfsman wrote:
>> Finally, this sounds like you do not want anybody else to create their
>> own distribution?
>
> It seems to be a real turning-point for OpenSolaris community.
> Martin has a point...how should we interpret your post ?
How about "In a charitable manner that presumes good intent?"
For me, this is all boiling down to a very simple decision tree:
If you want to call your distro /.*OpenSolaris.*/, it
needs to follow the rules for using the OpenSolaris
trademark.
If you don't want to use the OpenSolaris trademark on
your distro, then you can do whatever you wish. Period.
End of discussion. Schillix, Nexenta, Belinix and Martux,
as well as SX and SXDR all continue as is, completely
unchanged and indifferent to this conversation.
i.e., this is a trademark usage issue, not a community
membership, community endorsement, download-page-hosting
or who can use what bits one.
My understanding of trademark law is minimal - and growing
less every minute; IANAL. I think it says the following
about the rules for using a trademark:
Sun (the trademark owner) needs to ensure that the
OpenSolaris (and by reduction, the Solaris) trademarks
are adequately protected under a cross-section of
international trademark law. Without that confidence,
Sun's executives can't legally allow use of the trademark
since it is a major Sun asset.
The key protective steps seem to be:
(1) A clear usage policy that
(2) Has a quality control metric that is
(3) Administered by Sun (although this can be with
strong community direction) and
(4) Can be policed effectively
I hope we are all in agreement so far. If not, then we
might as well go home, since those points seem pretty
non-negotiable.
As they say, the devil is in the details. Somebody needs to
create a usage policy and there needs to be a quality control
metric to make sure the value of the brand is not diluted..
Hey, that's the Trademark and Branding Project over at
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/branding/
OK, what should that usage policy look like? Please come
over to the branding project (trademark-policy-dev) and help
us - it promises to be an interesting discussion.
-John
