Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 04:00:08 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "P. U. (Uli) Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <003601c14e56$0feb08e0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20011006080450.J243-100000@big>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: P. U. (Uli) Kruppa [mailto:root@pukruppa.de] >Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 1:12 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: Greg Lehey; freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; core@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: RE: Use of the UNIX Trademark > > >> TOG caught the website maintainers with their pants down and that's all >> their is to it and has a perfect right to say what they said. Score one >> for them. What we need to do now is to say "OK, you caught me" and fix >> the website to go into conformance, end of discussion. >Sic! >But: comparing two similar products is absolutely legal. >So there can be a paragraph "FreeBSD vs. UNIX" which >explains differences, similarities and common historical >roots. > I think that something else too deserves to be stated here about TOG. TOG has elected to go down the classification road of determining if an OS is UNIX by whether it meets a set of standards or not. This leads to some rather odd conclusions. One is that it's possible at some point in the future that both Windows NT and Linux could become UNIX. (Don't yell at me about it - this is right off their website) Another is that IBM's OS/390 (which like Linux is not derived from the USL source) is also allowed to be called UNIX. Now, I may be out in right field but I believe that TOG is taking the UNIX brand somewhere that we don't want to be. In short, I believe that one of the strongest advantages that FreeBSD has it's it's heritage - the fact that in essense, the FreeBSD project is the cumulation of over 20 years of development on an OS code base. My concern to this is that by TOG allowing just anyone to buy the UNIX certification that want's to, that ultimately if they get their way that in the minds of the computing public that UNIX is eventually just going to mean compliance to a set of standards and nothing else. So, if FreeBSD is equated to this then it becomes just another barnyard OS like all the rest of them that paid their money and got their chance. In short what TOG is doing is totally minimizing the importance of what that 20+ year development chain really has done for Real UNIXes like FreeBSD. To me, UNIX is an entire paradigm, a way of doing things with the computer, a fundamentally different computing experience from Windows or MacOS or DOS or VMS or whatever. But as long as the word remains bound up as a TOG trademark then TOG can make UNIX mean whatever the hell they want. This is where the real damage of having UNIX tied up as a TOG trademark is. Read the following quote from TOG's website: "Microsoft® Windows NT was developed as a completely new, state of the art, 32 bit operating system......Should the functionality meet the requirements of the UNIX brand then indeed it could become a registered UNIX system." Now, consider that UNIX is being used as a rallying cry to mean "It's an OS that's not Microsoft Windows" by many users. If Microsoft were ever to get UNIX certification then you've taken the rallying flag away from the anti-Microsoft community. Perhaps instead of finding ways to tell the FreeBSD illiterate that FreeBSD is basically UNIX with a wink and a nod, we should be finding ways to tell them that FreeBSD is noting at all like UNIX - instead of being symbiotic to UNIX we are competitive to it. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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