Re: open source and trademark

[Brian Stein <bstein@redhat.com>]

Kurt Skurtveit wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:34:03 -0400
>> From: Brian Stein <bstein@redhat.com>
>> In-Reply-To: <074101c6e803$210bdf90$0202a8c0@Violet>
> 
>> 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.
> 
> So I can take your source, change it randomly, and sell it as Virtual
> Infrastructure 3?
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> This is from the same Red Hat that has the most restrictive of
> trademark policies in the open source world with Fedora Core and RHEL?
> Please, climb off your soap box.
> 
> As I read it the XenSource policy is a reasonable attempt to be sure
> that what is delivered to customers claiming to be Xen really is Xen,
> and not a random bag of bits.  I guess you support a the same idea for
> RHEL and Fedora Core, otherwise you wouldn't protect them, right?
> 
> It also seems to be a decent policy for allowing other vendors to use
> the Xen brand. MySQL has done exactly the same thing
> (http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/logos.html) and ITIR Red Hat was
> perfectly happy to include MySQL in the distro.

In this comparison MySQL is a packaging exercise; the inclusion of a 
hypervisor and modification to the kernel we package and ship is a bit 
more work.  There is a significant amount of churn of these bits, both 
forward ported to 2.6.18 and backported to 2.6.9.

I'm not debating the merit, or lack there of, around the recent 
XenSource restrictions around the use of the term Xen.

There remains some ambiguity as to Red Hat's ability (and evidently 
others) to ship our version of these bits *and* call them Xen.  This was 
intended to inform others in the community what we are actively considering.

Brian