From John.Plocher at Sun.COM Wed Apr 30 10:14:41 2008 From: John.Plocher at Sun.COM (John Plocher) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:14:41 -0700 Subject: [trademark-policy-dev] I've updated the Trademark & Branding wiki page with feedback and suggestions from within Sun... Message-ID: <4818A901.2020300@Sun.Com> Please see (and comment on) http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Trademark_usage_and_Branding_guideline The process of community engagement followed by Sun engagement seems to be working well. Consider this to be another iteration of a cycle that (hopefully) will continue as the community and Sun both figure out what is needed, what is allowed, what works, and what doesn't... I'm planning on continuing this dialog at the Summit, though the timing of the session (Sunday early afternoon) means that the trademark lawyer I've been working with can't make it (bummer, Tiki is *good*!) I hope to rev the document once more to remove the rest of the open questions, get formal Sun agreement, and update the OS.o trademark page at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/trademark_faq/ -John Significant changes: I got answers for many of the open questions. Some of the answers aren't the ones I was hoping for, but I now understand why they are what they are :-) The "Overview" set of Q&A tries to address most of them. [Lawyers are not Engineers - even though we both many times use the same words, we don't always have the same meanings for them...] Since we don't yet have repositories, I moved the branding stuff for them to the TALK page as a parking lot, to be addressed once we have more clue as to what they imply. The Ubuntu REMIX concept - as articulated on the Ubuntu guide - seems to go beyond the bounds of trademark law in that it suggests combining branding names in the formal name of a remix. Rather than base our stuff on such uncertainty, it seems prudent to start with the simpler "Based on OpenSolaris" tagline and see if it can meet those needs. I moved the REMIX wording to the TALK page as well, so as to not lose it for future discussions. My crystal ball shows that [I hope] there will be a plethora of OpenSolaris distros that differ mostly by the set of packages (aka recipe) that they are built out of. This version of the guidelines doesn't address this ares very well, mostly because we don't have many of them yet. Chicken and egg - another topic for the Summit might be "what do we need in this space?" I moved a lot of the rationale and background to a new page: http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Trademark_usage_and_Branding_Background in order to make the guidelines simpler. One of the comments I received was Based on Sun?s experiment with early Java branding, in the later part of the document, it looks as if we?ve articulated more levels than a brand can successfully communicate... This referred to the Repositories, built-for, compatible-with and derived-from taglines that we had included in earlier drafts. There was a lot of pushback that TO START WITH, we should focus on a couple of easy to articulate brand tags. I settled for "OpenSolaris" and "Based on OpenSolaris", with the door left open for some sort of application and repository branding tags in the future. Again, I moved the wording we had for these concepts to the TALK page. From johnsonnenschein at gmail.com Wed Apr 30 10:54:53 2008 From: johnsonnenschein at gmail.com (John Sonnenschein) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:54:53 -0700 Subject: [trademark-policy-dev] I've updated the Trademark & Branding wiki page with feedback and suggestions from within Sun... In-Reply-To: <4818A901.2020300@Sun.Com> References: <4818A901.2020300@Sun.Com> Message-ID: <241540330804301054x1d5eef2cic7268296783d8662@mail.gmail.com> Hey Couple things: 1) "... construct an exact replica from the same OpenSolaris Repository using the same recipe and binaries? * You can call it something else and use the tagline Based on OpenSolaris * (The community would like to be able to call the result OpenSolaris, but the repos, distro builder and other required components are not "there" yet to be able to actually do this) " I still maintain something to the effect of "construct an exact replica from the same OpenSolaris Repository using the *A DIFFERENT* recipe and the same binaries?" , in as far as this language seems to allow a KDE respin ( Indiana - GNOME + offical pkg.opensolaris.org KDE ) with the canonical name for example, while the original would not. Very disappointing. 2) would the branded hoodies and baseball caps "non-commercial" clause allow for doing a tshirt run for an OSUG for handing out to all comers 3) "It is not "fair use" to use the OpenSolaris Trademark in a manner that disparages OpenSolaris technology or the community, " I think it is... "opensolaris sucks" is still fair use, no? (wrong... but fair use ) On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 10:14 AM, John Plocher wrote: > Please see (and comment on) > > http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Trademark_usage_and_Branding_guideline > > The process of community engagement followed by Sun engagement seems > to be working well. Consider this to be another iteration of a cycle > that (hopefully) will continue as the community and Sun both figure out > what is needed, what is allowed, what works, and what doesn't... > > I'm planning on continuing this dialog at the Summit, though the timing > of the session (Sunday early afternoon) means that the trademark lawyer > I've been working with can't make it (bummer, Tiki is *good*!) > > I hope to rev the document once more to remove the rest of the open > questions, get formal Sun agreement, and update the OS.o trademark page at > http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/trademark_faq/ > > -John > > > Significant changes: > > I got answers for many of the open questions. Some of the answers aren't > the ones I was hoping for, but I now understand why they are what they > are :-) The "Overview" set of Q&A tries to address most of them. > [Lawyers are not Engineers - even though we both many times use the > same words, we don't always have the same meanings for them...] > > Since we don't yet have repositories, I moved the branding stuff for them > to the TALK page as a parking lot, to be addressed once we have more clue > as to what they imply. > > The Ubuntu REMIX concept - as articulated on the Ubuntu guide - seems to > go beyond the bounds of trademark law in that it suggests combining > branding names in the formal name of a remix. Rather than base our > stuff on such uncertainty, it seems prudent to start with the simpler > "Based on OpenSolaris" tagline and see if it can meet those needs. > I moved the REMIX wording to the TALK page as well, so as to not lose > it for future discussions. > > My crystal ball shows that [I hope] there will be a plethora of OpenSolaris > distros that differ mostly by the set of packages (aka recipe) that they > are built out of. This version of the guidelines doesn't address this > ares very well, mostly because we don't have many of them yet. Chicken > and egg - another topic for the Summit might be "what do we need in this > space?" > > I moved a lot of the rationale and background to a new page: > http://www.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Trademark_usage_and_Branding_Background > in order to make the guidelines simpler. > > One of the comments I received was > Based on Sun's experiment with early Java branding, in the later > part of the document, it looks as if we've articulated more levels > than a brand can successfully communicate... > This referred to the Repositories, built-for, compatible-with and derived-from > taglines that we had included in earlier drafts. There was a lot of pushback > that TO START WITH, we should focus on a couple of easy to articulate brand > tags. I settled for "OpenSolaris" and "Based on OpenSolaris", with the door > left open for some sort of application and repository branding tags in the > future. Again, I moved the wording we had for these concepts to the TALK page. > > > > > _______________________________________________ > trademark-policy-dev mailing list > trademark-policy-dev at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/trademark-policy-dev > -- PGP Public Key 0x437AF1A1 Available on hkp://pgp.mit.edu From John.Plocher at Sun.COM Wed Apr 30 11:29:09 2008 From: John.Plocher at Sun.COM (John Plocher) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:29:09 -0700 Subject: [trademark-policy-dev] I've updated the Trademark & Branding wiki page with feedback and suggestions from within Sun... In-Reply-To: <241540330804301054x1d5eef2cic7268296783d8662@mail.gmail.com> References: <4818A901.2020300@Sun.Com> <241540330804301054x1d5eef2cic7268296783d8662@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4818BA75.9070104@Sun.Com> John Sonnenschein wrote: > Couple things: Thanks - my brain core dumped several weeks ago and I'm still running on momentum here :-) I appreciate the quick insanity check! > 1) > "... construct an exact replica from the same OpenSolaris Repository > using the same recipe and binaries? > * You can call it something else and use the tagline Based on OpenSolaris > * (The community would like to be able to call the result > OpenSolaris, but the repos, distro builder and other required > components are not "there" yet to be able to actually do this) > " > > I still maintain something to the effect of "construct an exact > replica from the same OpenSolaris Repository using the *A DIFFERENT* > recipe and the same binaries?" , in as far as this language seems to > allow a KDE respin ( Indiana - GNOME + offical pkg.opensolaris.org KDE > ) with the canonical name for example, while the original would not. > Very disappointing. I tried (and failed?) to capture this in the background page where I talked about who and how things get blessed as "OpenSolaris". The constraint is that only Sun can bless things named OpenSolaris-Foo. If you recreate an exact replica of something so blessed, you can still call it OpenSolaris-Foo. If you come up with a new thing (say, OpenSolaris-KDE), there is nothing that prevents the community from producing it (with a repo+distro constructor, this could be simplistically easy) and asking Sun to bless it with the name OpenSolaris-KDE. But, if the thing labeled OpenSolaris1.0 was an OS with GNOME, your KDE version would not be the SAME thing. From a trademark perspective, coke and diet-coke are not the same branded thing; neither would OpenSolaris and OpenSolaris-KDE. It would be great to have a branding place for things that fit the pattern "OpenSolaris Bootstrap core + some set of OpenSolaris packages". We're not there yet, but we will get there in the next spin of this document (which is to say that everyone is obsessively focused on getting OpenSolaris-the-distro born and nobody has yet realized that they are going to go home from the hospital with quintuplets AND that there will be many many siblings and cousins being born in the near future :-) > 2) would the branded hoodies and baseball caps "non-commercial" clause > allow for doing a tshirt run for an OSUG for handing out to all comers Absolutely. > > 3) "It is not "fair use" to use the OpenSolaris Trademark in a manner > that disparages OpenSolaris technology or the community, " I think it > is... "opensolaris sucks" is still fair use, no? (wrong... but fair > use ) Using "OpenSolaris sucks" as the name (or tagline) of your product is not fair use. Using it in print may straddle the line between free speech and libel, depending on the definition of "sucks" :-) Using it in personal communication about your impressions ("I think that ..." simply means that you will be quoted on slashdot :-) (IANAL!!!) -John From swalker at opensolaris.org Wed Apr 30 11:32:43 2008 From: swalker at opensolaris.org (Shawn Walker) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:32:43 -0500 Subject: [trademark-policy-dev] I've updated the Trademark & Branding wiki page with feedback and suggestions from within Sun... In-Reply-To: <4818BA75.9070104@Sun.Com> References: <4818A901.2020300@Sun.Com> <241540330804301054x1d5eef2cic7268296783d8662@mail.gmail.com> <4818BA75.9070104@Sun.Com> Message-ID: On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 1:29 PM, John Plocher wrote: > John Sonnenschein wrote: > > Couple things: > > Thanks - my brain core dumped several weeks ago and I'm > still running on momentum here :-) I appreciate the quick > insanity check! > > > > 1) > > "... construct an exact replica from the same OpenSolaris Repository > > using the same recipe and binaries? > > * You can call it something else and use the tagline Based on OpenSolaris > > * (The community would like to be able to call the result > > OpenSolaris, but the repos, distro builder and other required > > components are not "there" yet to be able to actually do this) > > " > > > > I still maintain something to the effect of "construct an exact > > replica from the same OpenSolaris Repository using the *A DIFFERENT* > > recipe and the same binaries?" , in as far as this language seems to > > allow a KDE respin ( Indiana - GNOME + offical pkg.opensolaris.org KDE > > ) with the canonical name for example, while the original would not. > > Very disappointing. > > I tried (and failed?) to capture this in the background page where > I talked about who and how things get blessed as "OpenSolaris". > > The constraint is that only Sun can bless things named OpenSolaris-Foo. > If you recreate an exact replica of something so blessed, you can still > call it OpenSolaris-Foo. > > If you come up with a new thing (say, OpenSolaris-KDE), there is nothing > that prevents the community from producing it (with a repo+distro > constructor, this could be simplistically easy) and asking Sun to > bless it with the name OpenSolaris-KDE. > > But, if the thing labeled OpenSolaris1.0 was an OS with GNOME, your > KDE version would not be the SAME thing. From a trademark perspective, > coke and diet-coke are not the same branded thing; neither would > OpenSolaris and OpenSolaris-KDE. > > It would be great to have a branding place for things that fit the > pattern "OpenSolaris Bootstrap core + some set of OpenSolaris packages". > We're not there yet, but we will get there in the next spin of this > document (which is to say that everyone is obsessively focused on getting > OpenSolaris-the-distro born and nobody has yet realized that they are > going to go home from the hospital with quintuplets AND that there will > be many many siblings and cousins being born in the near future :-) I'd just like to add that the Kubuntu folks had to go through the same thing with Canonical. They had to get permission to use the Ubuntu trademark in that way to indicate that it was a kde flavour of Ubuntu. The branding issue is very important to any commercial company. -- Shawn Walker "To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." - Robert Orben From johnsonnenschein at gmail.com Wed Apr 30 11:46:07 2008 From: johnsonnenschein at gmail.com (John Sonnenschein) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:46:07 -0700 Subject: [trademark-policy-dev] I've updated the Trademark & Branding wiki page with feedback and suggestions from within Sun... In-Reply-To: <4818BA75.9070104@Sun.Com> References: <4818A901.2020300@Sun.Com> <241540330804301054x1d5eef2cic7268296783d8662@mail.gmail.com> <4818BA75.9070104@Sun.Com> Message-ID: <241540330804301146j18eb258dsf62c48cbafef6893@mail.gmail.com> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 11:29 AM, John Plocher wrote: > John Sonnenschein wrote: > > > Couple things: > > > > Thanks - my brain core dumped several weeks ago and I'm > still running on momentum here :-) I appreciate the quick > insanity check! > > > > > 1) > > "... construct an exact replica from the same OpenSolaris Repository > > using the same recipe and binaries? > > * You can call it something else and use the tagline Based on > OpenSolaris > > * (The community would like to be able to call the result > > OpenSolaris, but the repos, distro builder and other required > > components are not "there" yet to be able to actually do this) > > " > > > > I still maintain something to the effect of "construct an exact > > replica from the same OpenSolaris Repository using the *A DIFFERENT* > > recipe and the same binaries?" , in as far as this language seems to > > allow a KDE respin ( Indiana - GNOME + offical pkg.opensolaris.org KDE > > ) with the canonical name for example, while the original would not. > > Very disappointing. > > > > I tried (and failed?) to capture this in the background page where > I talked about who and how things get blessed as "OpenSolaris". > > The constraint is that only Sun can bless things named OpenSolaris-Foo. > If you recreate an exact replica of something so blessed, you can still > call it OpenSolaris-Foo. > > If you come up with a new thing (say, OpenSolaris-KDE), there is nothing > that prevents the community from producing it (with a repo+distro > constructor, this could be simplistically easy) and asking Sun to > bless it with the name OpenSolaris-KDE. > > But, if the thing labeled OpenSolaris1.0 was an OS with GNOME, your > KDE version would not be the SAME thing. From a trademark perspective, > coke and diet-coke are not the same branded thing; neither would > OpenSolaris and OpenSolaris-KDE. > > It would be great to have a branding place for things that fit the > pattern "OpenSolaris Bootstrap core + some set of OpenSolaris packages". > We're not there yet, but we will get there in the next spin of this > document (which is to say that everyone is obsessively focused on getting > OpenSolaris-the-distro born and nobody has yet realized that they are > going to go home from the hospital with quintuplets AND that there will > be many many siblings and cousins being born in the near future :-) I understand. I'm not sure what sort of legal language would be required to capture (what I assume is) our intent here & the technical prerequisites for it, but I'm just going to assume that when the pieces are in place we can get that resolved PDQ > > > 2) would the branded hoodies and baseball caps "non-commercial" clause > > allow for doing a tshirt run for an OSUG for handing out to all comers > > > > Absolutely. Cool :) > > > > 3) "It is not "fair use" to use the OpenSolaris Trademark in a manner > > that disparages OpenSolaris technology or the community, " I think it > > is... "opensolaris sucks" is still fair use, no? (wrong... but fair > > use ) > > > > Using "OpenSolaris sucks" as the name (or tagline) of your product > is not fair use. Using it in print may straddle the line between > free speech and libel, depending on the definition of "sucks" :-) fair enough, and by the difficulty I've found in the last 5 minutes looking for an example of a "windows sucks" or similar tshirt ( which I would expect would exist. Some people love to declare their dislike for MS ), I'll assume that it's safe to say using the branding in that matter's off the table. > Using it in personal communication about your impressions ("I think > that ..." simply means that you will be quoted on slashdot :-) (IANAL!!!) And the washington post if you're prominent enough, evidently -- PGP Public Key 0x437AF1A1 Available on hkp://pgp.mit.edu From shivakumar.gn at gmail.com Wed Apr 30 14:37:25 2008 From: shivakumar.gn at gmail.com (S h i v) Date: Thu, 1 May 2008 03:07:25 +0530 Subject: [trademark-policy-dev] [ogb-discuss] License clarification? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <319ee2b10804301437i3d70c6e2xf769baf9de271032@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 8:26 AM, Shawn Walker wrote: > Greetings, > > I was hoping that someone could forward the following message on to > relevant parties at Sun to ensure some of the concerns raised are > addressed: > > http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/24/organic-vs-non-organic-open-source/#comment-371 > > In short, the poster worries that: > > * The OpenSolaris Binary License doesn't allow benchmarking > > * Is confused that Sun's recent assertions over trademark control > means that community distributions can't use the OpenSolaris Binary > Licensed components due to the trademark > I believe clarification regarding the OBL(OpenSolaris Binary License) by a qualified person is essential. Especially considering the way the use of the term *opensolaris* is evolving w.r.t trademark related discussions. Specifically I am unclear about the below restriction in the license. http://opensolaris.org/os/licensing/opensolaris_binary_license Permitted Uses. ....Sun grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license without fees to (a) reproduce and use internally the Software for the purposes of developing or running an OpenSolaris distribution. Clarification that covers reproducing, re-distribution & bundling would be very useful. thanks Shiv From Simon.Phipps at Sun.COM Wed Apr 30 15:31:58 2008 From: Simon.Phipps at Sun.COM (Simon Phipps) Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:31:58 +0100 Subject: [trademark-policy-dev] [ogb-discuss] License clarification? In-Reply-To: <319ee2b10804301437i3d70c6e2xf769baf9de271032@mail.gmail.com> References: <319ee2b10804301437i3d70c6e2xf769baf9de271032@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7AB94977-22F7-41B1-9B0F-C58D0D727FED@Sun.COM> On Apr 30, 2008, at 22:37, S h i v wrote: > Clarification that covers reproducing, re-distribution & bundling > would be very useful. It is possible to ask Sun's lawyers to answer questions about specific clauses or issues. You ask them, the OGB will get them answered. S.