Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote: > > On Wed, 4 Sep 2002, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: > > > http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20020904/sony0203.jpg > > Make sure you let your PMC or the board know if you want to take some > action; for example such as the ASF sending Sony a kind letter that the > name Cocoon is already in certain use.
Ok, maybe "now what?" wasn't exactly explaining my thoughts about this, so I'll explain my thoughts in more details. First of all, "Sony CoCoon" (an acronym for "COnnected COmmunity On Network") is a TIVO-like networked hard-disk based video recorder. Google "Sony CoCoon" to know more. Now. Cocoon is a common name. Besides, I already stole it from Ron Howard's movie and, to be honest, there *is* prior art in software for something called 'Cocoon' which is a javadoc-like tool. At some point, I received a "ehm, you stole my software name" from a nice guy that was, at least, asking for us to differentiate. The result of that action was that the project was officially named "Apache Cocoon", the xml doclet code we hosted moved to jakarta-alexandria (and died, but that's not another issue). We never received any other letter from the guy and I don't know the status of its project. What worries me most, to be entirely honest, is the fact that 'Sony Cocoon' is linux based. Admittedly a name collision is going to be extremely rare: who would want to run an 'apache cocoon' inside a 'sony cocoon' box? But you never know: it has a huge hard disk, it's networked, it runs linux, it runs a pretty decent MIPS processor and might be right perfect for a server farm of video streaming with an XML publishing engine (can you say SMIL?) Like many people suggested, doing nothing and sitting there relaxing is an option and a valid one. I agree. However, do you think that Sony would have let us go away with "Apache PlayStation" if we had one? What if they start selling millions of "sony cocoon"s? So I'm asking the PMC to take a reasonable action to protect our brand "Apache Cocoon" in a way that would not make it possible for Sony (or anybody) to make us 'cease and desist' to use our name. -- Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
