Re: open source and trademark

[Brian Stein <bstein@redhat.com>]

Steven Hand wrote:
> 
>> In my opinion this is similar to the issue that Debian had with 
>> Mozilla browser
>> trademark discussion(http://lwn.net/Articles/118268/).  Our philosophy on
>> using open source software is very much in alignment with the Debian Free
>> Software Guidelines 
>> (http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines). I don't
>> want to bore everyone on this mailing list with Virtual Iron 
>> guidelines for open
>> source software usage, but the most important item to us is free 
>> redistribution,
>> without any hindrance.  We take this approach with all of the open 
>> source software
>> that we create and release to the community, pure GPL, with no 
>> hindrance of any sort.
> 
> Xen is distributed under the GPL. At any point you can do anything you 
> want with the
> code (use it, modify it, encrypt it, freely redistribute it, put it on a 
> CD or a website or
> a t-shirt, etc, etc, etc).
> 
>> I do agree you with you that there is a naming issue.
> 
> Exactly.
> 
> There's a well-defined notion of what is "Xen" - the software built 
> openly by this
> community.
> 
> As long as that's the only thing that's _called_ "Xen", we'll be fine.

If only everything was as simple as using the term Linux.

Given internal (and external) concerns with our upcoming inclusion of a 
hypervisor-based on a popular open source project, we're considering 
using a neutral reference:

'CNH' - Common Neutral Hypervisor

I hope this is an acceptable term for others with similar issues.

Brian