On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 13:16 +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote: > Hello, > > Some guy from INRIA annonced on the website linuxfr he will published a > software named eSavane, https://linuxfr.org/~rootix/20797.html , not on the > field of Savane but near. > > I wrote a private message to this person highlighting the possible confusions > it may creates and asking him to reconsider the name he picked. > > He replied > > "Le nom est en cours de dépôt à l'APP et n'est référencé nulle part sur > le > net. Une lettre de différence n'est pas valable pour moi. Savane est > de plus > un nom commun." > > Which means that for him a stupid "e" letter in front of the word make it > whole different and that is enough for him. Moreoever, he announce that he's > willing to take legal action to enforce their name choice.
The APP procedures don't have any legal ground and use. They are like water in bottles: expensive and facultative, but makes you feel safe. We could only fight around trademark issues, and we're far from it. > What should we do about it? There plenty of evidences of anteriorities of the > usage of the word Savane (by the way, the word is used by others software but > on completely different fields) It's true that right now 'esavane' and 'savane' are really different words for Google. eSavane and Savane are really different softwares (an inventory tool and a forge). One is CeCILL (almost free :)) and one is GPL. I'd rather bet on a friendly - or at best neutral - cooperation with them: if some confusion and name dilution happens, they could print a visible note like "Disambiguation: there is another software called Savane bla bla...". The general idea is that if there is no obvious misbehaving (INRIA is not SCO, although they conracted with the dev...MS :§), cooperation and understanding is much more efficient and less tiring. If you're okay, you could recontact the guy and explain that you're just as concerned about your software recognition than he is, and that you would like to make a formal agreement of mutual redirection (the 'disambiguation note' on each other site for instance).
