On 26/10/2007, Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote: > John Plocher <John.Plocher at Sun.COM> wrote: > > > 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. > > It seems that you forgot an important issue: > > If someone starts to call a single distribution "OpenSolaris", > all other OpenSolaris based distributions would need to do the same > or at least make it much more obvious that they are also based on > OpenSolaris-ON and that the distribution called "OpenSolaris" is no more.
Everyone seems to believe that the proposed guidelines would not allow you to make a distribution called "The OpenSolaris GNOME Laptop Distro" -- that isn't true. If you look at the proposed guidelines ( http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Trademark_usage_and_Branding_guideline ); you'll note that as long as you stick with the official components you can do so. Admittedly, what isn't clear to me from that proposed guideline is whether you can add *additional* packages or your own graphical branding. Yes, it is also true that the current community distributions currently wouldn't be able to use the trademark in that way. However, you could call them: "SchilliX - Built with OpenSolaris technology" "Nexenta - Built with OpenSolaris technology" Remember, branding is a privilege; not a requirement. Trademarks don't exist just for the protection of a company or product; they also serve to provide clarity, confidence, and meaning to consumers (users in our case). When a user sees something that uses the OpenSolaris trademark; they're probably going to have certain expectations. I would like to see your comments on each point of the proposed guidelines Jorg when you get a chance: http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Trademark_usage_and_Branding_guideline Cheers, -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth
