Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 01:36:53 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Andrew J Caines" <A.J.Caines@altavista.net> Cc: "FreeBSD Questions" <FreeBSD-Questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: FreeBSD 4.3 is UNIX? Message-ID: <003c01c0ed9a$abd9d460$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010605023325.T49449@hal9000.servehttp.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Andrew J Caines >Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 11:33 PM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: FreeBSD Questions >Subject: Re: FreeBSD 4.3 is UNIX? > > >Ted, > >> Before I say anything let me point out [my sig] > >Yes, I have chosen to use a trademarked word and use it in a way which >derives from common usage and not the Open Group's requirement. A few >might even appreciate the irony of "Unix Systems".. a very few, that is. > :-) Yes, I did - one one hand you scrupulously follow the guidelines yet on the other hand you carefully break them. > >FreeBSD would not satisfy the certification requirements and I very much >doubt if anyone is insane enough to try and dress it up in a UNIX skirt to >get it certified. > Yes - but I'd assume that TOG would be willing to issue permission to use the UNIX name, separately from the UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 branding. After all, while satisfying the branding requirements allows you to use UNIX, there's no converse that I could see on TOG's site - that in order to get permission from TOG to use UNIX, you must satisfy the branding requirements. I know that TOG is trying to force branding but have you looked at some of the requirements? Including Java for UNIX 98 Server or CDE for UNIX 98 Workstation example? This is great if your Sun and you want to force people to license your crappy software that they don't want, just so they can slap a UNIX name on it, but it's pretty worthless to the consumer. It's pretty distasteful considering all those commercial UNIX vendors that are pushing TOG to include their crap all got their code originally from the USL UNIX distribution that didn't include it. TOG is increasingly making themselves irrelevant to the normal UNIX consumer. They should stick to POSIX and system call interface standardization instead of pushing unneeded junk into the distribution. I'll bet too that half the commercial vendors that have met certification STILL have bugs in their interfaces that have gone uncorrected. Meanwhile they just layer more and more unneeded junk into the OS. >> However, a trademark is only as good as the organization that owns >> it is willing to defend. > >You are essentially correct, but I believe that you will find that the >Open Group defend their trademarks very well since licensing their >trademarks accounts for most of their income. > There's a lot of companies these days that are starting to use more and more Open Source for servers, mixed right in with commercial UNIX systems. The last time that TOG tried to pick a fight with the Open Source community was with Xfree86 over the licensing in the new X Windows. While legally TOG was in the right, they took a tremendous public relations black eye over it, and ultimately were cowed into rewriting their licensing to put it back the way it was. Most times a CIO considering purchase of a major UNIX server is going to be buying it to run a particular piece of software (perhaps an accounting package, etc.) They are going to be getting a list of approved platforms from that vendor, and those will be considered first. Now, maybe if you have 3 vendors and one of them is UNIX 98 that might tip the scales, but other than that I don't see that a commercial UNIX compliance with any Open Group standard is going to be a make-or-break consideration. Compliance with the ISV's software is the primary consideration. Even organizations that seem to require it don't really - for example TOG claims that NASA requires TOG branding - but I've seen news articles on the web with quotes from NASA extolling the virtues of Linux and that certainly isn't branded. If TOG is seen as obstructionist to the Open Source movement, it's going to harm them much more than the Open Source movement will be harmed by TOG. I think that lesson was made clear after the Xfree86 debacle. After all the commercial UNIX vendors certainly cannot not know of the decreased marketing value of the Open Groups trademarks. One of these days your going to see someone like Sun decide they don't really need to slap the UNIX label on their stuff, and TOG will almost immediately take a severe and possibly unrecoverable financial hit. >This was the cause of my surprise seeing "UNIX" on the CD case. > >While most unix systems are UNIX(R) systems, I don't think referring to >FreeBSD, Linux and the others is sufficient to win the common usage >argument. That said, I don't think anyone is going to not use "unix" to >refer to the many flavours, UNIX and other. > Ah yes, but I wasn't thinking of that. It's much more usage in various news and trade publications to the commercial Unixii such as Solaris that is the danger, and it's something we all see a lot. > >It would certainly be interesting, although I wouldn't like to think my >subscription money is going to this cause instead of advancing FreeBSD >technologically and keeping the developers fed and warm. > I don't actually think that something like this would cause significant expense, as Wind River would almost certainly be advised by their company lawyer to immediately change the wording and make an apology. All TOG really would need from Wind River is a retraction letter to preserve their rights. Wind River is certainly not going to spend the money on this kind of a fight, and TOG isn't so stupid as to sue for lost sales or other damages like that. What's more significant from a legal point of view is if TOG chooses to do nothing, then a year from now someone else can cite the CD cover in a trademark dispute as evidence that the trademark has gone into common usage. >As for the "Unix industry", history has shown that the chance of a common >flag under which to unite against a common enemy is vanishingly small. >However, since this is just a symptom of the variety and competition which >has made unix platforms what they are today, I wouldn't say it's a bad >thing. > >Today's more powerful brands in the arena are "Linux", "Solaris" and even >"Gnome" rather than "UNIX" and the other Open Group trademarks. Yes, I agree completely. TOG seems to have moved from a leadership position in the arena to becoming little more than an apparatus of the major commercial players as they attempt to monopolize niches in the market using proprietary standards. And, based on anecdotal evidence, the major commercial UNIX players couldn't be more pleased with the existence of FreeBSD, Linux and the other Open Source OS's, viewing them as "gateway drugs" to the Real Stuff as well as incubators of major server programs like Apache and Samba, and utilities like Perl. I would guess that TOG would be quickly slapped down if they did anything more than feeble protestations to Wind River over this violation. Of course >the common confusion over the various names makes the distinctions less >practically significant. > Actually, it's better that way because it makes the advertising much more effective than if people had preconceptions already solidly formed. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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