Re: open source and trademark

[Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>]

Kurt Skurtveit wrote:

>> 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.

It's not a question of soap box, but a question of "collection"
vs "component", as well as a question of practical matters.

Components like glibc, the Linux kernel, Xen, and other programs
need to be maintained for years in RHEL.  Probably way beyond the
time where XenSource would still be interested in approving patches
for 3.0.3.   If XenSource were to lose interest in supporting an
old release, that should not mean distributions lose their ability
to support users using that release.

Personally, I think Debian was right with their "iceweasel" decision.

As to the RHEL and Fedora trademarks, there is a reason that all the
trademarked bits are nicely separated out into their own RPMs.  We
intentionally make it easy for people to rename things. There might
be something on that in the Fedora lists archives, not sure though...

Renaming things may be inconvenient, but not being able to properly
support users is outright dangerous.  As long as the distributions
can agree on a common name for "the hypervisor formerly known as Xen",
the renaming shouldn't be all that bad.

-- 
Who do you trust?
The people with all the right answers?
Or the people with the right questions?