On 01/11/2007, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at damore.org> wrote: > What I think we have here is a clear conflict of interest. I *do* > believe that *that* problem (regardless of my opinions for or against > Sun's usage of the trademark) needs to be resolved. Decisions about > *OpenSolaris* marketing *should* IMO, belong to the community rather > than to Sun.
But here's the thing. Sun pays for everything. Sun owns the webservers. Sun pays the people that make the hamsters dance in their wheels. Sun pays the engineers that work on Solaris and, indirectly or directly, OpenSolaris. Sun owns the trademark. Sun pays for the bandwidth. Sun does the legal due diligence for everything to work together. It seems as though the community enjoys making decisions as long as someone else is paying and ultimately responsible for them. With that said, I do think that community should have some say over how things are done. I just think that the community correspondingly has to take a level of responsibility that I suspect most are unwilling to take. For me, I'm perfectly happy with the *millions* of dollars and thousands(?) of man hours Sun has spent on the community's behalf and the work they're doing. > So, quite simply, I believe that there are only two ways forward: > > 1) Sun cedes complete control of the OpenSolaris mark to the community > (possibly establishing an actual non-profit to own/manage the mark) I don't think they can cede complete control unless we have a non-profit and that's just not necessary. Instead, clearly defined control over the trademark that they bind themselves would be more appropriate. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..." --Larry Wall
