On 8/21/07, hank williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1. I am not clear what name you are saying red5 comes close to infringing. > > 2. If it does, there are no damages without notice. You cannot sue if you > ask someone to change the name and they do. Its not like copyright > infringement where any infringement creates a statutory liability. Therefore > any intelligent open source project would just change its name. This would > not be a smart strategy for eliminating open source and I *strongly* doubt > red5 is at any risk from this kind of a plan.
That is precisely my point: knowing that any intelligent OSS project would rather change it's name than become entangled in a legal action, even a baseless one, Adobe will certainly opt to press that button, especially as they can do so anonymously. allowing them, at very little financial and zero publicity cost, to inflict a slight set-back upon a rival. This sort of incremental strategy is bread and butter to Adobe; if you study their history you'll see that they have always been far, far more litigious than other large software houses, even MS. Just to clarify, I'm not saying that there would be any validity in such an action or that it would prevail in court, the point is that it doesn't matter, it would never get that far, Adobe knows that. Another clarification: this has nothing, zero, zilch to do with the technical side of the project, nothing to do with infringing Adobe's code or whatever. If the project is forced to drop the name, everything will go on just as it has before. The only loss would be a drop in public awareness and, if it happens after 1.0, a slight loss of credibility - names changes are fine while you're still in beta but, after that, it sends a very mixed message. Again, it's just a name we're talking about, not a huge deal, certainly nowhere near as important as the apparent technical changes - things like branding and public awareness are rarely a priority for OSS projects and quite rightly so. I only brought it up because it's worth knowing what is actually happening when these bolts from the blue hit. _______________________________________________ Red5 mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/red5_osflash.org
