[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> A company called Trolltech have come up with a customised Linux OS >> called Qtopia ... so this Q thing is catching on elsewhere .....
Ummm, no. Qtopia is not a customised Linux OS, it is an API for developing embedded applications for hand-helds and so on. There's even a version called Greenphone Qtopia to build apps for a mobile phone. With the dev kit you get a phone (green!), a VMWare 'vitrual machine' to do your development and communicate with said phone, plus the Qtopia development kit and tools. Qtopia is the little brother of the Qt toolkit (pronounced 'cute' - although I mis-pronounce it 'Queue Tea') whihc is probably the best all round cross platform development system you can get for C++ development. I use it (to dabble with) from QStripper, but it works on many flavours of Unix, Linux, Windows and Max OSx. You can pay for a commercial licence if you want to sell your software (or keep the source code secret) or you can get an Open SOurce version for free provided you only build OS applications and make your source code available under the terms of the GNU licence. The Open version is only missing a couple of database drivers (Oracle for one) because of the licencing terms which boil down to the fact that open source cannot be linked to Oracle (for example) libraries. I'm sure I posted this email yesterday, but it appears not to have turned up - so I'm trying again. The company, Trolltech have been around since 1994 and have been expanding year on year ever since. The KDE project uses QT to build their GUI for Linux. On the matter of trademarks, I don't think it is possible tio trademark a specific letter (Q for example) simply as a letter. You can trademark it in some design, but only that design wiould be proteted. However, words etc (Q40 for example) can be trademarked. Now, The Graf brothers have been using the name Q40 for some time and it is a computer system. This means that they can, if they wish, ask Samsung to cease and desist from using the same name for their computer system - even though the Grafs have not actually registered the name. They have been using it and thus, it is 'prior art' (sort of). The Firebird database project has the same name as a Pontiac car, but it's unlikely the two can be confused, so Pontiac don't complain. Firebird used to be called Phoenix but the BIOS company complained that it was confusing to have two software products with teh same name, so Firebird it became. Then Mozill decided to rename their browser to Firbird a couple of years back. That cause problems all round and after a few weeks of email exchanges, they renamed Firebird to Firefox, and the rest is history! So, Q40, even if not registered has been in use and Samsung could be asked to refrain. :o) Cheers, Norman. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
