Al Hopper wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Oct 2007, Shawn Walker wrote:

>> The ability to use the OpenSolaris name is a privilege; not a right.
>                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> This is absolutely correct.  And, along with the ownership of that 
> trademark comes the responsibility of having to defend its use - even 
> in the face of a McBride/SCO type (never-ending) court challenge. 
> It's Suns trademark and they have the right to use it and mandate how 
> it can/should be used.  But they are also prepared to pony up anything 
> from $100k to $1m+ to defend it.

Sun owns the trademark, true, but I trust that the intention here is to 
share the brand with the community. To me, the brand becomes much more 
valuable when it's leveraged across the entire OpenSolaris community. 
That's what I'm waiting to see here. I think we need to see the full 
branding guidelines to see the full context.


>> I've been watching OpenSolaris since it first launched and I've seen
>> more progress and interest in OpenSolaris since Project Indiana was
>> announced than ever.
> 
> +1


Please be careful when comparing the present to the past. Indiana is 
standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before in this 
community. There have been a lot of people who have brought this project 
to the point where it was ready for a distro. And actually, some would 
argue that we are not even ready for a distro since Indiana is not based 
on 100% open source code.


> And I've been in favor of this project (after I recovered from the 
> initial shock of Ian Murdock being hired by Sun) - because it means 
> that people are putting money and talented developer manhours into 
> making OpenSolaris even better.  We (as in the community) are getting 
> a new installer, a new packaging/distribution mechanism and an 
> improved patching mechanism - and thats just for starters.  Who is 
> *not* in favor of that.  How "unfair" is that!?  Are you kidding - 
> this is *great* for OpenSolaris (the Project) and I don't care who 
> thinks its unfair that Sun owns the OpenSolaris trademark and wants to 
> associate some flavor of that name to describe a resulting 
> distribution which they have largely sponsored.

But shouldn't Sun share the trademark with the community in some way? I 
know the company doesn't have to, but we are trying to build a community 
and I think that's one of the basic issues here. I wonder what the 
reaction would have been had the name been released with a set of full 
branding guidelines enabling the community to engage in the brand.

> Let's come up with a policy that we can live with and let Indiana move 
> forward.  Let OpenSolaris move forward.  I'm sorry that we all can't 
> own valuable trademarks and land our private 767s in our "back yard" - 
> but we can help make OpenSolaris (and its derivitives) the best OS on 
> the planet and we *will* have to make compromises and sacrefices to 
> make this happen.

Agree. But can we not call it the "best OS on the planet?" :) Never 
liked that tag line.

Jim
-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
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