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Apple Sued Over Unix Trademark
Jerrry writes "CNET News reports The Open Group is suing Apple over unlicensed use of the Unix trademark, after Apple used the term in conjunction with its Mac OS X marketing. Apple, meanwhile, is countersuing to have the Unix trademark declared invalid because the term has become generic."
After all, Apple has trademarks of their own, how would they like it if MS or some other company started using them without a license?
AC comments get piped to
You know I love Apple as much as the next guy in many respects, although not one of the fanatics who have fallen into the apple marketing hype or a part of the cult(As I love my windows 2000 box as well) and Linux. Well, I love computers.
Anyway, Apple is getting a little taste of it's own medicine. Didn't they sue somone over them copying, or making a similar color scheme on a pc case?
And haven't they sued before for things just a frivilous. Apple is fanatic about protecting their ip.
But maybe they are wrong here.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I thought that apple paid the Open Group to certify themselves as a Unix, around the time that OS X came out.
What am I missing here?
... because if you took this stuff any more seriously, you'd have to cry.
SCO suing IBM
Open Group suing Apple
Apple suing Open Group
It's starting to sound like a game of "Six Degrees".
Apple, meanwhile, is countersuing to have the Unix trademark declared invalid because the term has become generic. Thank the great good lord someone with clout is finally going to push this position. Incidentally I've only ever seen Apple use the phrase 'Unix-based' or 'unix-like' in their advertising literature, but I haven't been exhaustive by any means. It's good to see them at least put up a good fight in the name of the greater good (i.e., stopping Unix snobs from weilding that particular sledgehammer against Linux) rather than just capitulating and signing a cheque, which they're certainly able to do.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
If most people look on it that way, the trademark is probably generic.
This is true. The underlying technology should be taken into account, rather than just the name used to describe it. Unix is a generic term now, and trying to sue people over a name that describes a large and diverse base of technology is just silly.
i agree! i'm a consultant and change jobs quite often (6 - 9 months) since most of the time i work on small web development projects. the whole LAPP things (Linux Apache PHP Postgres) - and guess what; nobody ever really says "we're developing using Linux", they say "we're UNIX based." It's either "Windows" meaning Windows 2000 (sometimes XP) or "UNIX", usually meaning Red Hat.
;)
Go Apple, even though I prefer to build my own pcs and run Debian. (I know I'm rambling. I'm at work bored till 9, inflating my income
In fact, I don't see Open Group suing FreeBSD over *their* use of the UNIX trademark, right on their front page!
My journal has hot
It has definitely become a generic term. I'd like to see the courts support Apple so that we can all use "Unix" without fear.
e a generic term. Removing trademark status would benefit not only Apple, but the free Unixes, Linux and the BSDs.
When was the last time that some company came out with Unix v9.0 or whatever?
Slipping Away...
In any case, no company is required to pay more than $110,000, said Graham Bird, vice president of marketing for The Open Group.
You know the legal battle will cost much, much more than that...but instead of doing what makes economic sense, they're doing what's right, and taking the burden off the rest of us. Because you know that if the Open Group succeeds, they're probably going to start suing red-hat and other linux distros for explaining that linux is "unix based" in their FAQ.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
They are not claiming FreeBSD is UNIX, they are saying it is based on BSD Unix (which is a UNIX, I belive grandfathered).
They might be able to tag them for failing to put the little circle r on it, but thats about it.
Except for groups like scientology that use it to harass, not too many other groups/corps/people sue over simple use unless you are claiming your product is their product.
BWP
I, personally, have a hard time not considering anything that uses either System V or BSD to be Unix. These have been the pillars of this OS, and when not used have been the models for other operating systems. I would not consider POSIX to be a good way to judge a system as being Unix because Windows NT 4.0 was POSIX compliant and it is not Unix.
I'm pretty sure Windows uses a good chunk of BSD code as well. UNIX, it ain't, though.
-----
Kvetch is Yiddish for "throw an exception" --Dr. Ron Cytron
Since Darwin is really a BSD-offshoot, shouldn't it have the same rights?
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
find the marketing genius that came up with this.
Apple used the term in conjunction with its Mac OS X marketing
have the Unix trademark declared invalid because the term has become generic
At least it seems that apple has now realized its product is generic and is using terms to describe it that way. So much for brand recognition. I find it amusing that the suit and tie crowd in advertising is getting PAID to declare their product generic.
Unix has become a generic term. Removing trademark status would benefit not only Apple, but the free Unixes, Linux and the BSDs.
I think there might be a little more to it than that. Just got done reading ESR's OSI Position on the SCO-vs-IBM suit paper, and it looks like the right to use the Unix trademark is conferred upon vendors who go through a certification process to confirm compliance to Unix standards.
So it's sort of like if somebody slaps the famous "compact disc" logo on a copy-protected disc - you're advertising conformance to a standard that you don't conform to. That's not to say that apple is necessarily out of compliance with the standard, the point is that the "Unix" trademark is the TOG's "seal of approval".
I agree with Mr. Perens. If UNIX trademark becomes generic, some Joe Blow can create any old OS and call it UNIX. How would you feel if you bought such an OS to find out that it's really based on Windows NT kernel?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
What about the trademark cases that gave The Open Group unix.net and unix.org. unix.net was hosted on one of my servers and when it was STOLEN by The Open Group via an ICANN bribe (donation) we were very mad. As anyone would be im sure. So, if Appl wins, would there be a way to reverse that decision being that it was such a short time ago?
It's quite generic. With regard to your "Coke" example - it's actually "Coca-Cola" - Cola is the generic part there, and anyone can (and do) use it.
When someone says Unix to me, in my mind, I do not think "Officially Licensed Solaris UNIX", I think, "oh, what flavor?" Is it Coca-Unix, or Pepsi Unix? FreeBSD Unix, or Linux Unix*?
(Demonstrating, of course, that Coke > Pepsi)
Sort of like saying "works with Windows" or "Made for Windows" when in fact it doesn't and isn't?
I like the idea of making UNIX generic because we can now market Linux and FreeBSD as UNIX, giving it instant credibility and attraction in the market.
I dislike the idea of making UNIX generic because we can now market Windows as UNIX, giving it instant credibility and attraction in the market.
Still, I believe that Apple has a legitimate claim to the Unix name, and that, contrary to what you say, OS X probably qualifies as a UNIX; at least as much as, say, Solaris does. Furthermore, I think that the case you bring up concerning Microsoft is probably trivial. Microsoft would open itself up to lawsuits based on false advertising, or false representation of goods or services.
I think legally the "UNIX" label carries with it a set of generic expectations on behalf of the general public, and nothing more. The public would clearly feel misled if Microsoft started marketing Windows as "Unix," as you suggest -- it clearly does not meet the generally accepted definition of what a "Unix" is. Apple's OS X, on the other hand, from any reasonably technical standpoint, clearly meets that definition. This definition is left intentionally vauge by this post, as I firmly believe the defition of a "unix" is vauge indeed.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Basically, to be a Unix, you have to (a) implement the Single Unix Specification, and (b) to pay license fees to the Open Group. Neither Apple nor the FreeNixes pay license fees to the Open Group, pay for Single Unix conformance testing, or fully implement it (due to some parts being inconsistent or plain stupid), so they are not Unix. It's that simple. And, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't matter at all.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Shit, they licensed Unix way back when they made AUX! I know that Next also licensed Unix from whoever owned it at the time, so for fuck's sake, they've already got 2 Unix licenses! I have always wondered if the other Unix companies (Sun, SGI, IBM, DEC, HP, etc...) had to buy a new Unix license for each version or type of OS that they had, or did they use the same one all along? For example, when SunOS became Solaris, and there was substantial feature change (breakage) to the whole OS, did they have to run out and buy a new Unix license, or did they use the old one that they still had for SunOS?
I would think that sooner or later somebody at Apple will remember that they, too, have one and quite possibly two Unix licenses of their own, and the case'll be thrown out.
are you sure? they don't mention a trademark anywhere on this page
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Dennis Ricthie has been noting products with the Unix name on his pages at Bell Labs.
/me dons tinfoil beanie
The timing of this is highly suspect. Apple is less than two weeks from unveiling Mac OS X 10.3, and signs are that they'll be announcing new 64-bit Power Macs based on the 970. Couple that with the fact that Quark has finally gotten their shit together and all those designers will be able to upgrade computer and OS, the Mac platform is poised to become a juggernaut.
Wouldn't surprise me a bit if some money to bankroll this lawsuit was coming, although circuitously, from our good friends at Microsoft-- scared because Longhorn is still a few horizons away and there's nothing good in the pipeline before it, and looking around desperately for something to obstruct/embarass Apple's progress.
While thinking about it, I would guess that Apple wants to be to able to use freely the Unix in its marketing, yet also have the freedom to build a system that is based currently on the Unix 'approach' and then branch as they feel necessary. Having to conform to Unix certification would probably prevent the system from evolving as it needs to.
What is going to be interesting is between this and the SCO vs IBM issue, Unix may just as well be in the public domain. There is so much of the basic workings that is public knowledge and has found itself into numerous computer science text books, I wonder whether anybody can lay a claim to Unix, either as intellectual property or as a trademark.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Not that arguing, debating, or even discussing this will matter or change anything but...
I've known about UNIX for about 10 years now. I've been using it in some form for about that long. (NetBSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, etc.) I know of The Open Group, I've heard/read a few mentions of them before, in relation to the UNIX trademark, but I haven't a damn clue what they do or why they own that trademark.
Do they make a version of UNIX? Shit, I don't know.
Do they market UNIX? Again, dunno. I never see any "UNIX: Brought to you by The Open Group" posters, or ads or anything of the sort. To me, they don't have any public presence.
Does this make me ignorant? Maybe. I've gotten along just fine being ignorant of this group.
What does that say about their trademark? I bet if you took a poll of the slashdot community (and since slashdot has that capability, why not?) most of them would probably not know which OS is REAL UNIX, or who The Open Group is, or what they do. Furthermore, I'd guess that most of them think about UNIX the same way I do: FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, AIX, whatever; it's all just UNIX, they basically all do the same thing. To me that's the equivalent of everyone calling bandages Band-Aids, or tissues Kleenex, etc., etc. I am not everyone else though, so perhaps I'm wrong.
Has apple misused the UNIX trademark? Perhaps. I do recall seeing some Apple ads touting that it is UNIX based, though I do not recall any stating outright that it is indeed UNIX (R). Does this mean that Apple is misusing The Open Group's trademark? Could be. But that's now up to our legal system to decide evidently, and given the actions of our legal system over the past 3 years or so, I'd say there's probably not a great outcome to this.
Gabriel Ricard
If nothing else, it would save us from all the ridiculous regexp's when trying to associate Linux with Unix.
Now I know this post will not be read by many because it's a late one in 500+ comments, and lemme preface by sayign I love Apple... but...
Why does apple license some ridiculous "technologies and patents" like 1-click shopping from Amazon and then at the same time not bother to plunk down the small amount (i'm sure it is for a company the size of apple) of change to officially get their OS UNIX certified?
I mean, it should meet the open group's standards, right? My concern is apple might not think it will meet TOG's standards and they'd rather not risk it. (eitherwise, they'd just pay for it like they did with 1-click)
A number of posts have mentioned that Apple is certified by the Open Group. I would think that the certification is for A/UX, not OS X.
It ran a patched version of the regular (system 7) Mac OS as a normal Unix process - so all of your classic Mac applications all ran together in one process, in one memory space, much like the regular classic Mac OS. But then you could have command-line Unix processes too. There was also Mac X, a rather nice X server, so you could run Unix X11 applications on A/UX as Unix processes, and display them in Mac X, which was a Mac OS application.
I beta tested A/UX 2.0 when I was a QA engineer at Apple in 1989 and 1990. I was testing the regular version of MacTCP, but was helping out the A/UX QA people who were testing the A/UX version of MacTCP that was really a shim over Berkeley sockets.
I believe A/UX 1.0 didn't have a Mac OS GUI at all. I think you could run a native X server on it.
Interestingly, they didn't use to have an installer of any sort. The way you obtained A/UX was to purchase it preinstalled on a SCSI hard drive. At work at Apple, we would duplicate installations by using dd to copy the whole hard drive to another drive.
I never had the sense that Apple as a whole ever took A/UX very seriously. For example, I was frustrated that A/UX wasn't really that great as a Unix platform, while not considering using it to run Mac OS.
It annoyed me no end that virtual memory page 0 in the Mac OS process wasn't unmapped - you could read and write nil pointers without error. That was done so buggy Mac applications wouldn't crash, but I felt that having an unmapped page 0 was the whole point to running a protected-mode OS on the Mac, to aid software development.
I also wanted Unix command-line tools for developing Mac OS applications. I thought it very silly to use the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop to develop Mac OS software on A/UX - it was a command-line tool in a GUI environment. I wanted to use Emacs and Unix make. I asked about this at the Apple WorldWide Developer's Conference one year and they looked at me like I had nine heads.
I think the reason Apple developed A/UX at all was to satisfy government procurement requirements that required POSIX certification - that's the same reason Windows NT has a POSIX box, not because Microsoft ever expected anyone to actually use it.
My understanding is that these days a Unix certification requires a whole bunch of things that neither Mac OS X nor any Open Source clone of Unix could satisfy - for example, Motif, and not just an open source clone like Lesstif.
Finally, the I/O architecture of Mac OS X doesn't bear much resemblance to Unix. For example, while there are special files in /dev, the files are created dynamically when hardware is discovered and deleted when the hardware is unloaded. You have to discover the filenames using a procedure based on Microsoft COM, as described in Apple's document
Accessing Hardware from Applications.
That alone makes OS X source code-incompatible with many Unix programs. It's not too hard to port, but the whole point of certification is that porting should be trivial.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Apple added to this a MacOS layer (all of the MacOS ran in a single A/UX process) - I was really impressed with the nifty job they did - if you look at the later A/UX releases when you walk up to a screen you have to look hard to figure out it's not a native MacOS box.
It only ran on 68k Macs, they let it die when they went to PPC - I still have a copy that boots, rumor is that there's an AUX DNS server still running somewhere in Europe. And of course I go to the A/UX user's group dinner at MacWorld every Jan.
And that is what counts with shareholders. I personally do somehow think of OSX as a "Unix" even though it's not. If Apple doesn't defend themselves they open themselves to being sued by every 2-bit SCO-like company to walk past the store front.
First - The Open Group was created in order to manage Microsoft's " open systems activities"(ActiveX) .
"The Open Group, created this year to act as the holding company for The Open Software Foundation (OSF) and X/Open Company Ltd., provides a worldwide forum for collaborative development and other open systems activities.
The Active Group, to be formed under the auspices of The Open Group, will manage the evolution of ActiveX technologies. It will take advantage of The Open Group services in the areas of development, branding, testing and licensing. The Active Group also will provide a forum for discussion and input on the direction of ActiveX."
Microsoft will provide specifications, source code, reference implementations and validation tests for ActiveX technologies to The Open Group.
They claim to support "standards", but their standards are not W3C type stadards. The Open Group's standards involves "Boundaryless Information Flow":
Any full solution to the Boundaryless Information Flow problem needs to have a chain of technology components, preferably based on open standards, that: - Integrate data - Securely deliver data - Register data - Enable the flow of data - Develop systems that enable this flow of data - Manage systems that deliver this flow of data - Adhere to policies that govern the flow of data
They want to standardize open source to the point of defining process and architecture. Sounds to me like a ploy to curb/control the innovation that is charteristic of the open source community and at the same time distract attention from standards like W3C. Interopablity has nothing to do with the flow, but rather the format of data (apple).
This lawsuit and their copyright is nothing but mickey mouse BS - much like SCO. Is Microsoft be behind both? If they are not - they should be - because the likes of Unix and Apple could sink their boat pretty quickly once they slap palladium in their product.
I agree that the term should no longer be considered a trademark owned by the Open Group, since it's generic, but as long as we're talking about misleading consumers... Is the Darwin/XNU/BSD-setup that passes for a kernel in Mac OS X really Unix? It's strays pretty far from the original kt & dmr KISS philosophy.
Even GNU's got that N in the middle of it's acronym to keep it from being Unix. Sure, the Hurd of interfaces representing depth in GNU is even further from Unix-think than Mac OS X but that doesn't mean that Apple saying "Built on the industrial-strenth foundation of Unix" isn't misleading.
Darwin is interesting but it doesn't have the multiple decades of testing that Unix has, and unlike Linux (the kernel) I've gotten a kernel panic just using a web browser. (I've had Linux crash on me when I've been doing stupid things with hardware. Mac OS X a lot easier.)
(Again, I'm not dissing Darwin, I'm just asking "What is Unix?" especially in the light of how Apple is marketing it's OS to unixheads.)
A longstanding failure to vigorously ensure that those third-party products only cover licensed Unices or otherwise make clear that unlicensed products are not Unix makes the Open Group's case a tough one to win. Just like asprin, kerosene and the thermos, Unix has arguably long been a generic term for a specific class of operating systems.
To put it another way, when you hear that an OS is Unix, do you immediately think, "Ah-hah, it's passed the UNIX 93, 95, 98 or Base conformance criteria administered by the Open Group! I can now use the T_TCO_TRANSFAILPROB QoS flag without fear!"
In any case, nothing can be more ironic than the X/Open version of the famous license plate: "Live Free Or Die: UNIX. (UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.)"
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
I wonder if it's been kept quiet cuz everyone knows it's a bunch of crap and hence Open Group doesn't want that publicity. It's been 18 months and still nowhere near trial, and it seems like many here are just now hearing about it.
What next? /. sued for having Unix as topic of discussion without licensing code and obtaining the proper permissions in triplicate? Sheeesssh!
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
Apple doesn't say that OSX is UNIX. It says that it's "UNIX-based" and has a bunch of material on the Apple site that says this. The legal question, a matter of law for a court to decide, is whether that is a use of UNIX that would require the certification process. I doubt it, since every variant - Linux, et al - is marketed as a UNIX-variant. To argue that UNIX is generic is much harder - and I think a loser - because everyone knows that UNIX refers to a specific operating system of which there are variants. The classic generic cases are items like Kleenex, which was threatened by its success at becoming so well known people asked for kleenex (small k) when they were using Puff's or some other brand. Now the ads all refer to Kleenex brand tissues as protection.
But "high performance tower computer with 100 MHz CPU" is a descriptive phrase, not a former trademark. (OTOH, you could buy a box of cigars marked "Corona" and not think you're getting parts for a certain model of Toyota.) And see
Dennis Ritchies "other UNIX" page for a collection of commercial "UNIX" items that aren't operating systems (hence the use of the mark is allowable).
All Microsoft has to do is claim that their "Windows Unix" certainly has common 'nix features (hierarchical file system, multi-tasking, some degree of POSIX compliance) to beat a deceptive advertising rap. (Hell, nobody has come after them for false advertising for claiming their software does a lot of things that it really sucks at, why should calling it a unix be any different?)
-- Alastair