Ralph Goers wrote:
Reinhard Pötz wrote:
Borland hasn't trademarked "silk" but only some variants of it. See
http://tinyurl.com/5bkw9d
"Silk" was trademarked by a company called mentis:
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=pgshps.20.117
The name that we would use is "Cocoon Silk". So I tend to think that
it isn't a problem.
WDOT?
Trademark or not, when people in software talk about Silk these products
are what they mean. Using a name that is already highly branded would be
a mistake. Maybe most of you are too young to get this but what would
you think of a project named Apache SideKick? If it wasn't a Personal
Information Manager people would be confused. If it was people would be
even more confused. (If you don't know what SideKick was see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideKick).
The point is, people would expect Cocoon Silk to be some sort of
performance measurement tool, probably with the expectation that it
hooks into Silk Test or Silk Performer somehow. (Which actually isn't a
bad idea).
I don't know neither SideKick nor Borland's Silk. I can't say if people
immediately start to think of test tools when they hear the world silk
somehow related to software. Silk is also used over 700! times in US
trademarks only so people probably have many different first ideas.
IIUC Borland didn't care themselves that another company has already
registered Silk and if other companies like Microsoft used Avalon for
software years after the Apache Avalon project was started. I can't
believe that they didn't know before ;-)
--
Reinhard Pötz Managing Director, {Indoqa} GmbH
http://www.indoqa.com/en/people/reinhard.poetz/
Member of the Apache Software Foundation
Apache Cocoon Committer, PMC member [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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