On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 12:20:35PM -0700, Keith M Wesolowski wrote: > On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 11:48:02AM -0700, Stephen Lau wrote: > > > This is all true... but one of the fundamental true-isms of engineers is > > that we like to have whizzy cool project names. > > Exactly. It boosts morale and increases participation. The SMF > Community was at one time offering Greenline mugs to anyone who > submitted new (correct) service manifests. I wonder how many fewer > would have been received if instead of the word Greenline and a spiffy > logo (either of both of which could conceivably be infringing, > offensive, or otherwise disliked by our lawyer overlords), it simply > said in plain block letters "Service Management Framework." > > No one wants to work for Initech even if it pays well. But it's > absurd to expect people who aren't getting paid to put up with boring, > uninspiring, and soul-crushing legal impediments to join and > contribute to our community. This entire thread leaves me with half a > mind to pick up and go myself.
Okay, so clearly we're at an impasse here. Engineers (at least some) want descriptive project names and will leave if we don't get them. But clearly we can't expose the OpenSolaris community (and yes that includes Sun) to the possibility of a vicious trademark lawsuit. I'd much rather Sun put $$$ into more productive things than a potential lawsuit. Simon mentioned: "The use of "Project" as a prefix was probably an attempt to mitigate any trademark impact, so scrapping it might not be smart" If it sounds like "Tesla" might expose us to a trademark lawsuit, but "Project Tesla" wouldn't - then fine... let's allow descriptive project names, prefixed by the word "Project", and let's see if we can make the minor webapp change to alphabetise and ignore /^Project/ when sorting. Is that a sufficient compromise? cheers, steve -- stephen lau // stevel at sun.com | 650.786.0845 | http://whacked.net opensolaris // solaris kernel development
