On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 17:14 -0400, Matthew Rubenstein wrote: > I'm not sure that a trademark on "Asterisk" prevents anyone else from > saying their product "works with Asterisk", or "is compatible with > Asterisk". The trademark prevents anyone else from calling their own SW > PBX by the name "Asterisk", to prevent consumers in the market confusing > the new product with Digium's. But if the other product is in fact > compatible with Asterisk, as advertised, or otherwise is related to > Asterisk, but is not marketed confusingly *to be Asterisk*, trademark > doesn't prohibit using the word descriptively. Digium has no control > over that. >
you would think but that is not what digium claims on their webpage for the usage of the word "Asterisk". Further if you change the name to something else, something allowed under the GPL you lose the linking exceptions making the software broken. The name change is required if its not "Genuine Digium Software" per their policy if you change anything, add a patch, a module, or take away modules for reasons other than portability. It is this that I am requesting a change in, the claim that you cannot exercise the rights granted by the GPL by way of the trademark and license exception trickery. > I don't know whether trademark prohibits that use of "Asterisk" or not. Digium lawyers claim to know, and claim on their trademark policy that it does prohibit the use of that word. > Because "a fork" means "is not the same as the original", but in a way > that means "better than the original" (as it is used). If that were true then it would seem dispariging to Digium, a banned activity by their policy. Technically this also removes the ability to publish test results that do not put asterisk as the top of the list. > However, I'm pretty sure that this has been resolved in the courts. > Even though it's HW, not SW, the "100% IBM Compatible" PC clone > marketing in the 1980s comes to mind. Then it should not be a problem for Digium to comply with these requests. All I am asking for is no restriction on the GPL rights granted, along with the ability to "advertise" works based on those rights (ie having a webpage describe what it is). -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel Belfast +44 28 9099 6461 US +1 516 687 5200 http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you! _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
