Re: [Xen-devel] open source and trademark

["Kurt Skurtveit" <kskurt@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:34:03 -0400
> From: Brian Stein <bstein@xxxxxxxxxx>
> In-Reply-To: <074101c6e803$210bdf90$0202a8c0@Violet>
> Steven Hand wrote:
>
> > > In my opinion this is similar to the issue that Debian had with
Mozilla browser
> > > trademark discussion(http://lwn.net/Articles/118268/).  Our philosophy on
> > > using open source software is very much in alignment with the Debian Free
> > > Software Guidelines
(http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines). I don't
> > > want to bore everyone on this mailing list with Virtual Iron
> > > guidelines for open source software usage, but the most important item to
> > > us is free redistribution,
> > > without any hindrance.  We take this approach with all of the open
source software
> > > that we create and release to the community, pure GPL, with no
> > >  hindrance of any sort.
So I can take your source, change it randomly, and sell it as Virtual
Infrastructure 3?

> > Xen is distributed under the GPL. At any point you can do anything you
> > want with the  code (use it, modify it, encrypt it, freely
redistribute it, put it on a
> > CD or a website or a t-shirt, etc, etc, etc).
> > > I do agree you with you that there is a naming issue.
> > Exactly.
> > There's a well-defined notion of what is "Xen" - the software built
> > openly by this community.
> > As long as that's the only thing that's _called_ "Xen", we'll be fine.
> If only everything was as simple as using the term Linux.
> Given internal (and external) concerns with our upcoming inclusion of a
> hypervisor-based on a popular open source project, we're considering
> using a neutral reference: 'CNH' - Common Neutral Hypervisor
> I hope this is an acceptable term for others with similar issues.
This is from the same Red Hat that has the most restrictive of
trademark policies in the open source world with Fedora Core and RHEL?
Please, climb off your soap box.

As I read it the XenSource policy is a reasonable attempt to be sure
that what is delivered to customers claiming to be Xen really is Xen,
and not a random bag of bits.  I guess you support a the same idea for
RHEL and Fedora Core, otherwise you wouldn't protect them, right?

It also seems to be a decent policy for allowing other vendors to use
the Xen brand. MySQL has done exactly the same thing
(http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/logos.html) and ITIR Red Hat was
perfectly happy to include MySQL in the distro.

Has Red Hat ever let any other vendor use its brands?  Or is you next
release called Common Neutral Linux?

Kurt
Xen Hosting http://rimuhosting.com/

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