Jon Orwant (lists.advocacy):
>This is where ORWANT turns into Orwant and I stop speaking for the
>company, because I think you have an excellent point. To keep a
>trademark, you have to be vigilant in protecting it. If you don't,
>you lose the legal protection that a trademark provides. (I hope we'd
>all agree that it'd be unfair for another publisher to put a camel on
>its cover, because it would make references to "the Camel book"
>ambiguous.)
A further thought on this: O'Reilly needs to protect the camel in some
way because the camel doesn't just stand for Perl in public perception -
for good or ill, it stands for O'Reilly as well. I believe this is
unfortunate - we'd be better off with a "pure Perl"[1] logo - but there is
nothing anyone can do about it now. O'Reilly as a company should place
controls on ways that people can *appear* to be affiliated with the
company, and the use of the camel is one of those ways.
But nobody speaks for Perl; there's no central Perl authority (well,
there is one, and I'll come back to that later) and so there is no
need to exercise such protections on a Perl logo. In fact, it's
inappropriate to do so.
*IF* we can come up with a good and acceptable logo for Perl itself,
rather than an O'Reilly product which comes to stand for Perl by
extension, then I propose that such a logo should be copywrited either
by a Perl-oriented non-profit, such as the Perl Mongers or Yet Another
Society, or Larry Wall himself; then a copyleft should be applied in the
manner of the Linux penguin.
[1] That wasn't, when I wrote it, a suggestion for a slogan, but looking
back on it, "Pure Perl" sounds like a neat "Intel Inside"-style thing.
--
"You can have my Unix system when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers."
