On 11/1/07, Alan Coopersmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > John Sonnenschein wrote: > > Since Murdock and the rest of Sun's marketing department decided to > > stab the community in the back by defining by executive fiat what > > exactly "OpenSolaris" meant, perhaps it's time to rename what the old > > bits used to be. > > > > Anyone on OGB or other committees, what's the likelihood we can > > reclaim ON et al. with a new name to allow people like Nexenta to > > continue to be part of the community. > > > > Sun can call their distro OpenSolaris if they like, but perhaps the > > solution to keep them happy and not anger and split the community is > > to ignore "OpenSolaris" as being the Sun Microsystems product it is, > > and call $foo the community and the code > > You'll have to come up with a completely new name (not just NetSolaris > or FreeSolaris) unless you can convince Sun management to allow use of > a derivative of the Solaris trademark.
Correct, the goal of this would be to find a trademark, that can be used as the $foo community sees fit. > Once you have that name, doing a trademark search to make sure it's not > infringing someone else's trademark is (if I recall correctly) a 4-6 > digit number of US dollars, depending on how many jurisdictions you want > to search in. If you find a conflict with another trademark, then it's, > stop/rinse/repeat, costing another iteration of the search fees, until > you get a good one. Let's assume for a minute that the Trademark is filed in the US. (I know that's not perfect, but it is a starting place). If you pay outside council to do the search, and file the applications, it will cost many thousands of dollars. If you do it yourself, the trademark search is free. (And all the lawyers will do is search the USPTO website anyway). Also, filing a trademark application does not require an attorney, and costs ~$700 per application to file. Add to that the costs for filing with the IRS for a non-profit corporation, and you are going to get close to $4-5K. (This number assumes it's an all volunteer organization, and that group does all of it's own work.) > So is it possible? I don't know why not. Is it going to be cheap or > easy? Probably not. I agree that it won't be cheap or easy, but it doesn't need to be as expensive as people are thinking. The much easier route would be for Sun to back away from this divisive decision to bypass the existing "democratic process". If anyone wishes to pursue/lead this, I can help/advise on the trademark side, as I have done a lot of research to prepare for the Trademark and Naming/Branding Development project in the Advocacy CG. (BTW - I must say the Internet is awesome... this wouldn't have been possible 10-15 years ago.) Cheers, Brian P.S. - The fact is that this will most likely not get off the ground, unless there is a large outswelling of support from within the community. > -- > -Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering > _______________________________________________ > opensolaris-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > -- - Brian Gupta http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nycosug/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
