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Rendezvous Renamed to OpenTalk
Gogo Dodo writes "Back in August, Slashdot covered Tibco suing Apple over the Rendezvous trademark.
AppleInsider now reports that the lawsuit has been settled and Rendezvous' new name will be OpenTalk." Meanwhile Zeroconf sits in the corner and cries.
Apple (and MS) are both being sued over 6 patents held by BTG, which their pnline updating systems allegedly violate.
Link here.
Looks like fun and games ahead for Apples lawyers.
I think you misread/failed to read the article. Apple is changing their product's name. Tibco is not.
Yeah that's the same.
TIBCO has had a patented networking protocol called Rendezvous for years that is the core of their whole business. It runs a few small systems you may have heard of like, oh, NASDAQ.
It's not too hard to see why they might be upset at another company coming out and promoting a completely different and unrelated networking protocol with the same name.
I believe he was referring to the fact that the ZeroConf name was tossed out not once but twice, and the second time, it wasn't used even though the last name had to be discontinued due to legal issues. The name was crying, not the technology.
Well, maybe you don't realize this, but Rendezvous basically *is* AppleTalk for TCP/IP. It has all of its benefits, nearly all of its features and it works with normal Routers and TCP/IP hardware.
OpenTalk is the perfect name.
And, FWIW, AppleTalk only has a bad name because the first version (Phase I) had a problem where it would get too chatty. This was fixed in Phase II which was released shortly after Phase II and has been available for over 10 years now. But people's opinion of AppleTalk was already ruined so it basically never recovered.
PS. A recent problem with AppleTalk is that the new Macs that could boot Mac OS 9 are way too fast for common routers. For instance, if the spanning tree protocol is turned on, it is possible for a mac to send a request about AppleTalk and finish booting before it got an answer. This was the origin of the message "Your AppleTalk network is now available" at bootup on a lot of macs.
Tibco's Rendezvous can be used to the do same task as Apple's Rendezvous, i.e. dynamic configuration. They both use multicast and don't require server endpoint configurations like addresses, etc. However Tibco's Rendezvous can also do generic, certified, and transactional messaging and hence Apple's product description does harm by implying Tibco's software has less capabilities, i.e. inferior, to what it really is.
To update the trademark links, Tibco was formally Teknekron:
Rendezvous/OpenTalk is an implementation of ZeroConf, ZeroConf is an open standard, therefore Rendezvous/OpenTalk is an implementation of an open standard.
Beyond that, Apple's source code for their mDNSResponder (the core of Rendezvous/OpenTalk) has been available under the APSL since it debuted in jaguar, and therefore is open source.
So I'd say OpenTalk is a reasonable name to use (espescially in comparison with AppleTalk which did the same thing in an apple only sort of way).
Yes indeedy. Apple has made the source code for a POSIX implementation of the Rendezvous daemon available on their web site so you can download it and build and run it on any POSIX-compliant system. (So they say. I haven't touched it myself in nearly a year.)
For something like a printer, your best bet would be a Rendezvous proxy service that runs on machine X and advertises a printer service on printer Y. It requires configuration on your part, but only once for each device or service you want to proxy. I believe the source for a POSIX proxy responder is included in the Apple source tree as well.
I write in my journal
I worked for a summer at my college, which was setting up one of the first broadband cable installations in the world at the time (summer of '95). The IT guys did NOT like AppleTalk for precisely that reason.
AppleTalk is nice for LANs. I use it myself (or more precisely the AppleTalk Filing Protocol, which has run primarily over IP since, I don't know, around '98 or so), even on OS X, because it's still more smoothly integrated into the system than anything else, but Apple (wisely, I think) made a herculean but partially failed effort to get rid of it simply because there was no need for it anymore with TCP/IP taking over everything. What ZeroConf/Rendezvous/OpenTalk is doing is bringing the last important piece of AppleTalk functionality -- the ability to announce services -- available to the TCP/IP world.
Now between BootP/DHCP and OpenTalk, there is no further need for AppleTalk except on legacy networks.