On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 9:29 PM, Matt Lee <[email protected]> wrote: >> Finally, the Ubuntu naming issue is important, but I think (a) it's >> almost completely off-topic for autonomo.us, and (b) Mako is right that >> we should wait for the Ubuntu Council to have time to react and do >> something about it, and (c) when I compare the Ubuntu naming thing to >> the fact that UbuntuOne is proprietary, it seems that the Ubuntu naming >> thing is a minor issue by comparision. > > Perhaps. But I have been thinking about this a bit... > > Laconica has Identica, and GNUkebox and Nixtape have Libre.fm -- but do > we want to protect Identica/Libre.fm as names at all?
Probably you want to protect laconi.ca and gnukebox/nixtape; you probably want to be able to avoid the old java problem and what happened to odf recently[1] by guaranteeing to users that if something says 'compatible with laconi.ca' it really is compatible, so that they can have the maximum freedom to move their data back and forth. The identi.ca/libre.fm marks are less important. It certainly isn't a *bad* thing to do a reasonable job of protecting them- that could help you make a reasonable basis of the expensive service without doing much (any?) damage to user autonomy. Two caveats, offhand. First, you can't[2] prevent factual references to your software- e.g., 'based on the same code as libre.fm'. Additionally, from an autonomy perspective, you'd probably want to allow some flexibility- you want people to be able to add features (as compatibly as possible) without worrying too much about trademark. Sigh. I really need to finish my paper on this. :/ Luis [1] http://www.robweir.com/blog/2009/05/update-on-odf-spreadsheet.html [2] Despite what several open source projects try to do. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.autonomo.us/mailman/listinfo/discuss
