Re: open source and trademark

Re: open source and trademark

[Kurt Skurtveit]

> 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.

Has Red Hat ever let any other vendor use its brands?  Or is you next
release called Common Neutral Linux?

Kurt
Xen Hosting http://rimuhosting.com/

Re: open source and trademark

[Brian Stein]

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

Re: open source and trademark

[Rik van Riel]

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?

Re: open source and trademark

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sat, Oct 07, 2006 at 02:48:34PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 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.

And at the other end of the spectrum, Fedora's mission is to track
the very leading edge of open source development. For the kernel
this means that the daily rawhide releases are based off pre-releases
of Linus' newest kernel and forward-ported  xen-unstable. We typically
only lock onto a formal release of the kernel/xen shortly before the
final test release. The trademark rules lead to the ridiculous situaton
whereby we can't call the intermediate rawhide releases xen (because 
they're based on xen-unstable), but once FC6 locks onto official 3.0.3
we could then call it Xen[1].

So we are left with two bad options - either stop using xen-unstable for
rawhide releases (which would mean much less testing exposure for Xen
unstable tree leading to lower quality releases), or change the name in
Fedora which will cause great confusion for users & developers alike and
fragment the Xen community :-(  The value of testing xen-unstable in our
rawhide releases is faaaar to great to stop - anyone can look at the 
archives to see the kind of serious bugs we've uncovered through exposing 
xen-unstable to Fedora testers, so it looks like a rename is the lesser
of two evils :-( 

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

I agreee - its just not a scalable approach to require every single
distributor push all their patches back through a single point to get
'approval'. Even today there are countless patches pushed submitted
to xen-devel mailing lists which never get so much as a ack/nack for
weeks at a time, requiring frequent reminder emails from the submitter.
To suggest people need to follow such a process to all patches they
distribute is impractical.

>From reading the trademark rules / FAQs it appears one of the motivating
factors for only allowing official releases to be called Xen is an idea
that this improves quality / compatability for end users. This is is a
rather dubious idea. What improves quality is getting as much testing as
possible - throughout development - for example by distributing xen-unstable
releases to as many users as possible. Providing a stable HV ABI & application
API also improves quality seen by users - current situation is akin to 
every single kernel release requiring a matched glibc release. Bludgeoning
people over trademarks doesn't improve quality, it merely fractures the
development community :-( One of the great strengths of Linux is that there
is such an open & free development process, even though Linus has the one
'master' tree, anyone who wants can maintain custom trees - and the users
don't suffer from compatability problems because everyone understands the
value of providing a consistent stable ABI across releases & branches.

Regards,
Dan.

[1] In actuallity it looks like we can't call FC6 bits Xen anyway, 
    because while the HV is pretty much identical to 3.0.3 we forward
    port the kernel bits fo 2.6.18.
-- 
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston.  +1 978 392 2496 -=|
|=-           Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-               Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-  GnuPG: 7D3B9505   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505  -=| 

Re: open source and trademark

[alex]

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.

I do agree you with you that there is a naming issue.

-Alex V.

Alex Vasilevsky                                    Virtual Iron Software
alex@virtualiron.com                               Tower 1, Floor 2
978-849-1211                                       900 Chelmsford Street
                                                   Lowell, MA 01851

Re: open source and trademark

[Steven Hand]

> 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.


cheers,

S.

Re: open source and trademark

[Brian Stein]

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

Re: open source and trademark

[Bastian Blank]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 11:19:15PM +0100, Steven Hand wrote:
> >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.

No. It does not allow the use of this name for a snapshot from
xen-unstable.

Bastian

-- 
The man on tops walks a lonely street; the "chain" of command is often a noose.

open source and trademark

[Ben Thomas]

XenSource has recently posted guidelines for use of their trademarked
materials. These guidelines have an impact on what may be used from
the open source project's source control system.  We have the
appropriate changes in our source release, and have a patch available
upon request.

See http://www.xensource.com/company/legal.html for more information.


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Thomas                                         Virtual Iron Software
bthomas@virtualiron.com                            Tower 1, Floor 2
978-849-1214                                       900 Chelmsford Street
                                                    Lowell, MA 01851

Re: open source and trademark

[Aron Griffis]

Ben Thomas wrote:  [Tue Oct 03 2006, 02:29:05PM EDT]
> See http://www.xensource.com/company/legal.html for more information.

Is this any different from the mozilla terms that brought about
iceweasel?

Aron

Re: open source and trademark

[Bastian Blank]

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On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 04:24:13PM -0400, Aron Griffis wrote:
> Ben Thomas wrote:  [Tue Oct 03 2006, 02:29:05PM EDT]
> > See http://www.xensource.com/company/legal.html for more information.
> Is this any different from the mozilla terms that brought about
> iceweasel?

A little bit. They allow security fixes. But it means that Debian have
to rename Xen.

Bastian

-- 
The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play.
		-- Kirk, "Shore Leave", stardate 3025.8

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