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Trademarks Considered Harmful To Open Source
An anonymous reader touts a blog posting up at PC World titled "Trademarks: The Hidden Menace." Keir Thomas asks why open source advocates are keen to suggest patent and copyright reform, yet completely ignore the issue of trademarks, which can be just as corrosive to the freedom that open source projects strive to embody. "Even within the Linux community, trademarking can be used as obstructively as copyright and patenting to further business ends. ... Is this how open source is supposed to work? Restricted redistribution? Tight control on who can compile software and still be able to call it by its proper name? ... Trademarking is almost totally incompatible with the essential freedom offered by open source. Trademarking is a way of severely limiting all activity on a particular product to that which you approve of. ... If an open source company embraces trademarks then it embraces this philosophy. On the one hand it advocates freedom, and [on] the other it takes it away."
I disagree with the whole underlying point of the article. I think Mozilla should be able to stop someone taking their source, adding a whole bunch of unstable "improvements" as patches and calling it Firefox. It would damage a brand that is one of the best brands that FOSS currently has. It doesn't stop people getting the browser, if they don't Mozilla's restrictions they could call it, say, EarthHorse.
The article throws around terms like "restricted distribution" and "severely limiting all activity" but gives examples like CentOS where CentOS and Red Hat exist happily together but with Red Hat still able to build up a brand with some protections.
The article ends "just like patents and traditional copyright, it's totally incompatible with the spirit and ethos of open source software.". People here may not like the length that copyright lasts for but the GPL relies on the fundamental idea of copyright. Similarly there may be some issues with trademarks but if so they need patching not a whole sale revolution as this article seems to suggest.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
someone would Trademark "First Post"
In theory, the the idea of the GPL exists only in opposition to copyright... it is a "necessary evil" for an future good.
If there was no copyright, there would be no GPL... two sides of the same coin.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
It's about protecting your users, and protecting your project.
Take a large, reputable open source project like Audacity. If some scammer comes along and bundles their own version of Audacity with some spyware and tries to distribute it under the Audacity name, this is damaging to both users and the reputation of the software. Audacity's defense against people like this is their trademark. Nobody will confuse real "Audacity" with any ripoff, because nobody else can use the name.
This also protects the developers, who have worked hard to produce great software, and who deserve to have it recognized as something special on their resumes/CVs. Preserving the reputation (ie. name) of your software project helps ensure their contributions to the project aren't devalued.
Lastly, the Mozilla example in the article can easily be countered by the infamous OpenSSL/Debian fiasco, where a Debian packager incorrectly patched OpenSSL and created a vulnerability. This was certainly damaging for OpenSSL's reputation, even though it wasn't their fault. If Ubuntu decides to patch Firefox and introduces bugs, it's Firefox (NOT Ubuntu) who looks bad to users. IMO this is good justification for exercising ownership of your trademark.
Just because source is open does not give you the right to hijack the work of a team and call something by the same name.
It does give you the right to take the source and make something else with it, and that is great. But because so much of the reward of open source is working on something that many people get to use an enjoy, diminishing the power of trademark removes a strong element of motivation by allowing names to mean less through dilution.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"A Rose by any other name is still as sweet."
sudo mount --milk --sugar
If copyright didn't exist, maybe we wouldn't need GPL.
DRM and copyright protect stuff, technology or data or ideas. Trademark, on the other hand protects a name, an identity.
Kleenex has not been the only brand of facial tissues for a very long time, the name is protected but not the concept. RedHat and CentOS, as already mentioned, are a perfect example of this working, the name RedHat is protected but the open source code is not.
Brand means more in some cases and than in others, as consumers and techies are at times very brand loyal. But when things become commodity items, consumers look less at brand than function, need, and appeal.
Trademarks are meant to protect the origin of a commercial good. This allows consumers to recognize a product and remember its quality or lack thereof. It's necessary to have trademarks in open source software. Imagine if anyone could create a browser and call it Firefox. Mozilla Firefox is going to get stomped down by "forks" that introduce all sorts of spyware in the source code. Without the protection of trademarks, Mozilla would have to sit idly by as its market share gets split up.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Nope, you're confusing that with BSD-style licenses. BSD-style = do what you want with the source, including releasing products without source code. GPL = if you release product using source, you must release source you used to build product. Without copyright, BSD-style is all you'd have.
A while ago, the same factory produced a Toyota Corolla and a Geo Prizm. Chevrolet sold the Geo Prizm. Even though it was nearly identical to the Corolla, customers preferred the Corolla, and it had higher resale value than the Prizm.
Trademarks are important because the name itself -- a string of characters -- has financial value.
Then you could just distribute binaries.
Modify the source code however you like, sell the binaries, with purely technical restrictions (ala Product Activation, Genuine Advantage) to prevent people copying them, and frequent updates to obsolete any old cracked version.
I disagree, the problem with copyrights and patents is that they restrict the distribution and development of the 'protected' ideas.
The only restriction a trademark places is that you can't represent yourself as something or someone you're not.
I doubt the author would be happy to find the movie he rented for his children Trademarked as "Disney's the Lion King" was actually hardcore porn.
This sounds like sour grapes that some developers can't coast off the work of others.
...The trademark allows Mozilla to protect Firefox's reputation. Anybody can still redistribute any derivative of the worst quality under a different name. As for the GPL: it is there to stop anyone from impeding access to the original or derivative code.
Trademarks are not a bad thing. It makes it clear what you can expect. If I download firefox, I would like to know what I am getting (for better or for worse). Now If I would make a fork that has a completely different aproach and won't work with certain plugins (like Adblock), you will think that Firefox is bad. Well it is, but it is my version, not the one somebody else made.
So I do understand the need for trademarks. Now how do companies deal with trademarks is a different question.
It is e.g. perfectly possible to re-distribute openSUSE as it is. It is also extremely easy to make your own openSUSE distribution that includes e.g. MPlayer, the codecs and libdvdcss and some other stuff that might be illegal or forbidden.
So what they say is to be able to do that to either contact them (If you are a magazine, they will be very helpfull and have often a special distro just for you) or to remove all the branding. I contacted them and their legal department where very appologetic in saying that they could not change anything about it due to the fact that they MUST react to any trademark issue.
So instead they made a toold that makes it easy to remove those trademarks, so it is now even easier to make something like CentOS but from SLE or openSUSE and even get the help from Novell to do so.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Signed,
Keir Thomas
What?
If trademarks are a restriction of freedom, then me using Keir's name to endorse my own ideas sounds like exactly the type of freedom he's arguing for. So what if it breeds confusion and implies an endorsement that doesn't actually exist?
Attribution - you can do anything you want with another person's work, but you can't pass it as your own
Trademark - you can do anything you want with another person's work, but you can't pass the derivative as his/hers.
I don't see what's the big deal. It's something that an honest person or business would be already doing even without any laws to the contrary.
After reading the article the only thing I can say is that the author has no clue about how Trademarks work. The examples don't even make sense. The protection afforded by Trademarks to the consumer is important - more so than other forms of intellectual property. With open source, a trade mark does not prevent you from redistributing the product under a different name or a derivative name. Trademarks are one of the few forms of intellectual property that makes sense. Why is that? Because they evolved organically and were not constitutionalized.
In contrast, copyright has been steadily extended to the point where it no longer serves its original purpose of rewarding the creator. Now copyright rewards the business that buys it up and monetizes the product after the creator is dead. While patent has been extended as a concept to the point where it inhibits the creation of new ideas. Give us back an 8 year patent and a 13 year copyright.
That would force people doing that to make frequent updates to their software with genuine improvements, which is hardly the worst way things could go.
I am trolling
This is what happens when people use the term "IP" - they get things like Trademark and Copyright totally confused.
With FOSS you're free to modify + redistribute. If the project you're redistributing is trademarked then you're going to have to change the name for your modified version.
In fact the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed; obviously the best way to comply with that is to change the name.
Nick
What you are saying is that you want to see Microsoft Firefox being the name for IE.
Is that really a good idea?
The GPL exists to force work that builds upon it to be GPL, as well. It directly opposes copyright by forcing that which builds upon it to be copyleft.
BSD has no such rules. It doesn't oppose copyright, rather' it simply doesn't care one way or the other You can "build either copyright or copyleft works upon it.
Perhaps that makes my point more clear.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Note quite, but almost. You only need to provide the parts of the program that are derivatives of the original work.
Eg. You make a game and want to use the Quake3 engine. You decide that you want the graphics and physics parts, but write your own networking part. As long as the networking code and the quake3 code, as a separate executable called by the engine for example, then you only need to release the physics and graphics part of your application.
The guy who wrote this insane piece is at best a troll, most likely an expendable pawn.
And he was able to find another troll (kdawson) to post it on slashdot!
It's amazing, every time a stupid article is posted, I scroll to the top and guess who poasted it? kdawson!
The reason for this article appears in the first sentence. He was irked that they weren't too happy that he went about using their trademark for personal financial gain, and decided to air it out in public.
If this guy really understands the topic that he himself is choosing to write about, he should be able to take a step back and realize what everyone commenting on this thread already knows: trademarks protect your own personal branch of the code. Even the most permissively licensed (BSD/MIT) project can have a trademarked name and logo. They're protecting their "fork" or "branch". This has nothing to do with open-source, it doesn't take away any of your freedoms.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Zealous trademark enforcement can't shut anything down. No matter how crazy, say, Mozilla someday goes with a powerhungry IP grab, all they can do is stop you from representing your product as Firefox, identifying your product using their logo/name. You can still mention Firefox. Trademarks don't give a company control over a word. You could absolutely market "JoesBrowser" and say "this awesome browser is based on the excellent opensourced Firefox(tm) code, with only the atrocious Awesomebar(tm) stripped out."
I think GP meant a bit different thing. Historically, the reason why GPL appeared in the first place was because of copyrights on software. RMS himself said that if copyright was gone, there would be no need for GPL.
When reviewers review Linux they often say things like "Even I couldn't figure out how to install X with Linux, how could a novice user possibly learn how to use Linux". However computer novices don't try to install software. In my experience the main problem novices have with Linux is that they cannot find the Internet Explorer icon. Once you tell them to click the Firefox icon instead they have no problem.
I don't think that Trademarks are anything like copyrights. However they can be a PITA, and they could have potential for abuse. I don't think we should use the e.g. IE icon for firefox even though it would save new users some grief. However I agree that some uses of trademarks could be seen as abusive. I can see how Prohibitions on unmodified redistribution could be seen as abusive, for example.
Advocates freedom, but then takes it away? Are you fucking kidding me? Open source is a good thing. ubuntu, redhat, gentoo. These are names we associate to particular operating systems. without trademark, we would have every fat greasy linux geek calling his own homebrew distro "Knoppix xtreme" or something equally banal. Trademark preserves the quality image we have in our minds of a particular product. I mean, let's take the DS and PSP for example. Their trademarks are ripped off blatently by chinese company's making extremly low quality, similar looking products. Eliminating trademarks on opensource product's will have the EXACT same effect. Every trademan, programmer, anyone who put's anysort of work into a product, either for self gratification or momey, deserves to have their product, if made to a high degree of quality and worksmanship, be considered good. he doe's not deserve for some charlatan to come along and call his lower quality and inferior product the same name to leech the reflected glory away from the original worksman, who im going to call bill. Bill has 3 kids and a mortgage, a nagging wife and a goldfish. if bill leaves boston travelling in a car at 60 miles an hour and tracey is travelling from new york in a time capsule travelling 120 miles an hour, how much wood will a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood? To summarise: dont do school, stay in milk, drink drugs. I'm all for freedom and the open source way, but there's limit's, without those limit's,we wouldn't have limits, and we'd be limitless in our depravity. if we follow that particular line of thinking,pretty soon we'll have women riding horse's one leg on each side, salt in our lasagne and massive orgies in the street, thousands of naked bodies writhing in ecstasy, all on the cusp of losing complete sexual control.......................on second thought, down with trademark!
BSD code is truly free no matter what you use (or misuse) it for.
Stating that GPL mean free software is like saying that Patriot act protects freedom in America.
For all of you who still don't believe that trademarks are a powerful tool to prevent the spread of free software, ask yourselves: Why has only one company released a phone with Android OS, when it should be freely available as open source software?
Releasing something as open source, whilst retaining the trademark can give you all the good PR and still let you make exclusive deals.
IANAL, but I am a layman that did papers on this in college - and the long and the short of it is this mostly sounds like a massive misunderstanding on several peoples parts about what can and cannot be done via Trademark.
Fundamentally, a trademark, used properly, means that if something you were using doesn't work as expected. you know who to blame. You may not be able to get satisfaction from Microsoft when Windows crashes, but you can at least be assured that when you say "Microsoft Windows just rolled over and *died*" People are reasonably sure who you are ticked at.
Yeah - if you've altered Firefox or Ubuntu or something else, and you give it away, then if it says Firefox, and it's not actually Mozilla's code, Mozilla has a right to be ticked that you altered it but didn't tell your end users they weren't actually using Firefox. But if you recompile your modified code and call it "Mike's fiery fox (A firefox based browser)" - they know the difference, and there's no copyright infringement.
All this amounts to is sign your oen name to your own work. That is *not* a big opensource conundrum.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
That's because kdawson doesn't believe in indentity protection. kdawson gave up his trademark and as such any troll is now free to post stories under his name.
Sincerely,
kdawson
almost - if you've made CHANGES, you have to include the source. pretty redundant if every single OSS project out there released the source of all the libraries it used
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
From the article:
It is clear; commercial projects operate with different motives than free projects. Commercial projects aim primarily to make users cough up cash, whilst free projects aim primarily to provide something useful to users. The difference in motivation often produces starkly different results.
Yeah, Debian is really suffering because of that...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Can we please ask the Slashdot editors to avoid tabloid titles?
The title reads "Trademarks Considered Harmful To Open Source".
but it should read: "A Random [Uneducated] Guy Considers Trademarks Harmful To FOSS"
Thanks for listening.
But without copyright, what is the point of releasing binaries and not providing source? Users will distribute binaries to each other (no copyright -> no one has to buy or license them from you), AND won't contribute to your development, AND you will have to update your binaries for every new platform because no one else can produce the binaries.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Bullshit, GPL code is 100% free to use, 100% free to build upon for internal use and 99% free to build upon and distribute. It's only restriction is on restricting other's freedom.
Does BSD licensing provides more freedoms?
Actually not, not freedoms in plural, in practice it only gives you one (1) more freedom, there is only one single reason why someone looking for an open source license would choose BSD over GPL, to keep the freedom to restrict your users freedom at some point, directly or by a third party.
You can choose whatever suits you but comparing the GPL with the PATRIOT Act is nothing more than FUD.
But... the future refused to change.
This is not strictly true. You have to be able to provide ALL source code. I assume you could just point those who want the source code to each projects webpage though.
There seems to be an assumption in this thread that copyright reform means copyright elimination. People can be pro reform while still being pro copyright. Reforming copyright can be as simple as changing the term from the current excessively long (IMO) time to a shorter one more in tune with the idea of "a limited time". They can also be in favour of a better system to get copyrights declared abandoned so abandoned materials can enter the public domain.
There are other aspects that people might like to see changed. Why does a photo of the Mona Lisa (just of the painting nothing else) deserve a copyright when the original is centuries out of protection? Why could I edit an old bible to correct punctuation errors and get a new copyright?
There are of course others who want copyright to last forever. A Senator for example wanted to legalize copyright vigilantes destroying computers that they believe contain unauthorized copies of their copyrighted materials. These too are reformers who are still pro copyright.
So you see people may well be pro copyright and still want changes
Without copyright the GPL is unenforceable. It requires copyright to exist. To be pro GPL you need to be pro copyright. You can still want changes to the current copyright system however.
The main point about the GPL isn't that it allows you to distribute and modify code; it's that it forces you to licence any derivative of GPL code that you distribute under the same terms.
Mandating the same freedoms for derivatives is a central tenet of GNU philosophy (I suggest reading about the Emacs fork which drove RMS to write the GPL in the first place), and a very important one. If Linux was released under a BSD style licence I'd bet my life that a proprietary closed source fork would have become dominant.
The thing about this is - it relies on copyright law to force this. It's a brilliantly creative use of the law. If you have time, consider reading the GPL FAQ - it's very interesting.
Suppose I build a custom car, I bought a sound system say, from JVC, for it, it doesn't quite fit so I take it apart to change its proportions. Does JVC have a ground to sue me for trademark violation? No because its obvious that:
a) This is a mod not the original product.
and
b) This is done for integration and compatibility.
This is EXACTLY what Debian and Ubuntu do to Firefox, why does it has to be treated differently?
Maybe its because it is not so obvious. If Ubuntu makes it so Firefox launches a notification on first launch:
"This version of Firefox was modified by the Ubuntu Team to better serve you"
On what legal grounds can they sue Canonical? And if so, does it mean that JVC can also sue me?
But... the future refused to change.
BSD code is truly free no matter what you use (or misuse) it for. Stating that GPL mean free software is like saying that Patriot act protects freedom in America.
It merely depends on what you mean by free, and to whom. One could claim that BSD is the ultimate freedom for the coder, and GPL for the code. So could we stop this silly contest now? All of us know the difference between BSD, GPL and LGPL, and I, for one, use all 3 licenses depending on my wishes. The argument is akin to an argument whether men in a society that allows murder is more or less free than one that does not.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
'The guy who wrote this insane piece is at best a troll, most likely an expendable pawn.'
Yes, his cover goes so deep his sinister paymasters have even instructed him to write several books about Ubuntu, and even give one of them away for free, presumably as part of a machiavellian plot to undermine other Linux distributions and deprive genuine FOSS-supporting authors of their livelihoods:
http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/download_main.html
Back in 2006, his evil campaign of dangerous misinformation apparently managed to subvert a popular technology blog, which went so far as to describe one of his poisonous publications as 'a good book which is both informative and entertaining at the same time':
http://books.slashdot.org/books/06/03/29/1437217.shtml
I can't even hint at the shocking details of the plot that led to this guy being awarded an Editors' Choice Award by the hopelessly compromised 'Linux Journal' - I have a family to think about, and They know here I live...
What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
The only reason why I agree with Stallman's "GNU/Linux," claim is because the kernel itself cannot be successfully compiled with any compiler other than GCC.
However, alternatives to the CLI GNU userland do exist. The most obvious one is the BSD, but there is the heirloom project, asmutils, and Caldera's source as well.
KDawson is the new Katz!
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
If I recall correctly in one example before "Linux" was trademarked by Linus Torvalds, some random guy trademarked it and demanded royalties for its use.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
But both copyright and "copyleft" are restrictions placed on distribution/derivation from protected material. They may be aiming for different ends, but they still use the same legal "force".
A BSD-style license explicitly demolishes the copyright protection the author would otherwise have on the work. It roughly gives the work the status it would have if copyright didn't exist. That seems like opposing copyright to me.
Excellent rebuttal. I look at it as an inherent tradeoff between different people's freedoms, here developers and users. Either the developer can boss his users around since he holds the source code, or the users can restrict him from doing that. The BSD and GPL simply favor the respective parties. The GPL argument is that there are far more users than developers, so trading for more user freedom is a net benefit.
I have no problem with trademarks because I have no problem with being restricted to not modifying a program upon distribution while still calling it the same name. That's *respectful*. If you modify a program, you rename it. Common netiquette.
What is wrong is modifying some software, like Firefox for example, and then distributing it, and then those modifications causing problems with various things (like Ubuntu's Firefox meddling causing issues with certain Firefox themes, for example), and then users reporting those bugs to the *Mozilla* developers, making them go wtf...that's not us who did that...it creates a nightmare for everyone.
Respect the developers and use *their* program, or call it something else! You shouldn't have to be recompiling *anything*. Play NICE with the internet community and developers, and stop pretending your distro is an island. Linux should be Linux, so start respecting it's programs and it's standards and in general communicating and playing nice.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
RTFA. Go on, do it.
.
.
.
Done? Now go and re-read the comments.
Oh, done already? Now tell me - where has anyone claimed that the author of TFA was a shill? What has happened here is the guy got in a bit of trouble over use of the Ubuntu trademarks. Rather than just admit that he had made a mistake, he decided to start spewing FUD about how trademarks are bad.
That act - and that act alone - is why he has been called a troll.
In Tetris v. BioSocia, Tetris Holding is trying to claim a combination of nine game mechanics as trade dress, despite that all but one of the listed mechanics have been seen in the Nintendo product Dr. Mario Online Rx.
Trademarks serve an important purpose. They're the social equivalent of a encryption certificate, helping the consumer to associate a product with a known entity. Trademarks themselves are not dangerous or counter to open source in any way and writing them up as such is really just attention whoring by the author. What is damaging is the misuse of trademarks. Examples of misuse include when one tries to stop others from releasing products that claim compatibility with your trademarked good or that mention your trademarked good as a lesser competitor etc. This type of abuse should be forbidden by trademark law and penalties should include loss of the trademark for repeated offenses. Then maybe companies will use trademarks for what they are intended. That said much as RMS does us harm by ignoring rational discussion and turning every issue into a religious extremist philosophical debate with black and white lines where only he is right, this type of writing does us harm by taking a position that is silly and extremist.
If Linux was released under a BSD style licence I'd bet my life that a proprietary closed source fork would have become dominant.
But without copyright, it would be lawful for a competing company to take this proprietary fork, disassemble it, comment the crap out of it, and spread it on Usenet.
With DMCA, and no copyright law, DRM becomes totally impotent. It only takes one crack and a mirror at say "freephotoshop.com" and its game over. You would have no legal recourse againt "freephotoshop.com"
Frequent updates you say? How is that supposed to be a problem? Simply dont update till the new crack is out. You must know as well as everyone else that DRM is just an arms race - hence the necessity for the DMCA.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
AND you will have to update your binaries for every new platform because no one else can produce the binaries.
That's a good thing if you're the maker of a custom computing platform, such as Sony or Nintendo.
With no DMCA
that should start...sorry
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
The GPL requires source distribution precisely because this is very difficult to do and come up with something useful.
does not mean that OpenBSD and NetBSD are not. The argument the author tries to fly is flawed in so many directions. As the FP stated, Mozilla is able to protect it's brand image from harm by enforcing their trademark. Everyone remember the recent openssl debacle that a debian maintainer was involved with? Provided a patch that shot the entire security of openssl down in flames on all debian related projects and yet the debian name wasn't harmed, just that of the openssl project, even though they didn't screw up.
That's exactly the kind of threat this article insists on allowing. In fact even MS wouldn't be for the elimination of trademark because then I could legally use all of their artwork/logo's and even the spelling to sell my version of Linux that I'm now Calling Vista 7 by Microsoft. That's my company name so where's the consumer confusion?
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
DNS provides human-friendly names that map to collections of IP addresses. Trademarks provide human-friendly names that map to collections of cryptographically signed code. Any questions?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
rolfwind writes: Imagine "Windows 7 integrated with Microsoft's new browser Firefox!"
You don;t have to imagine: this is what Microsoft already tried with Java, extending it with MS-only functionality. Only the trademark agreement with Sun protected Java uses from embrace, extend and extinguish. MS had to start an entire new language project in order to copy Java, and give it a new name thus losing name recognition.
MS fanboys use C#: everyone else uses Java, unextended and unextinguished. Now if they'd just add apply... (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
'Now tell me - where has anyone claimed that the author of TFA was a shill?'
'...most likely an expendable pawn'
This is what's called a 'metaphor', and is meant to suggest one under the control of another, more powerful entity. You may be confusing 'pawn' with 'porn', a common mistake often thought to be responsible for the (frequently observed) sharp decline in chess club attendance after the first week, when the terminology is explained. To illustrate:
Expendable pawn:
http://www.darlmcbride.com/
Expendable porn:
http://membres.lycos.fr/fredrichung/forum/nerd%20porn.jpg
Just because source is open does not give you the right to hijack the work of a team and call something by the same name.
AIUI, that is a right which must be taken away, not given, and (this I'm sure of:) there is nothing in the Open Source definition which takes it away.
Just because a name isn't a trademark does in fact give you the right to hijack the work of a team and call something by the same name.
Imagine if anyone could create an editor and call it Emacs. The FSF is going to get stomped down by "forks" that introduce all sorts of lucentware in the source code. Without the protection of trademarks, the FSF would have to sit idly by as its market share gets split up.
I completely disagree. Open Source is about freedom. It is not protecting you from your ignorance. If you always want to go with the 'brand' and remain ignorant of possibly better alternatives you should be free to do so.
I was somewhat curious about his arguments, so I read TFA.
The guy is wrong in so many ways it's astounding, considering the brevity of the article.
But, it's kind of persuasive, if you were clueless about the subject itself, and didn't have much interest or skill in reasoning out the arguments and what they would mean in the real world.
Then it occurred to me.
The guy can write.
He just can't think.
He's a Journalist!
The GPL requires source distribution precisely because this is very difficult to do
Difficult? Big fucking deal. The GPL requires source distribution because contracts between software publishers and end users (try to) make this illegal to do.
oh come on whether you like or hate kdawson that was funny!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"On the one hand it advocates freedom [...]" is wrong. That movement's founders at the Open Source Initiative thought that dropping the freedom talk would make their movement more amenable to business which is their target audience. That movement's developmental methodology asks people to make choices not based on establishing and preserving user's freedom but short-term value to business.
The movement which focuses on user's freedoms is the Free Software movement which predates the Open Source movement by over a decade. The FSF, whose president Richard Stallman founded the Free Software movement, writes the most popular free software and free documentation licenses.
This difference in philosophy is why, despite both OSI and FSF agreeing to give their respective imprimateurs to various licenses, they reach radically different conclusions about proprietary software. Considering an example where one is faced with choosing to use or reject a powerful, reliable proprietary program, Stallman points out why the latter is better for society in his essay "Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software":
Digital Citizen
Flame bait or not, this issue is currently pertinent to a project at my work place where I recently deployed a number of kiosks for a student government association at small community college. Those kiosks run Debian 5.0.1 with... IceWeasel and display location-tailored web sites produced by a supposedly open source-pioneering web developer. Since the developer doesn't understand that IceWeasel is Firefox (even with the 'about IceWeasel' screen referencing Firefox and Mozilla)... I've been asked to rebuild all of the kiosks with a more popular (i.e. I'm not a slut. I'm just popular.) operating system / web browser combination. Never mind all of the time it took to learn linux well enough to implement these things. Never mind the fact either that the web developer's .css doesn't validate. Never mind the fact that their xhtml doesn't validate, and never mind the fact that their java script doesn't validate. Blame it on the po-dunk, back-woods I.T. guy not using Windoze and Firefox. Comments and suggestions from the Debian crowd are appreciated. Thank you.
(Now, if I could just get my SkyHippo going.)
sorry, "every ISP" -> "every ISV"
Trademarking ties identification to a product, project or even concept/philosophy. This badge carries with it a culture and legacy of quality control, commitment, customer support, rules, regulations and a roadmap to the future. Those responsible for the product/etc. of course protect that space, wanting to ensure that some little piss-pot (i.e. the article's author) isn't interpreted as speaking with their voice.
Sure, trademarking is tied to marketing controls, access restrictions, and a whole assortment of tools that could be used to stifle innovation, but an invention that can be used for evil doesn't make it an evil invention. Used properly, even these sharper edges help establish source and maintain quality control.
The article was obviously inspired by a nose bent out of shape, and as usual with infotainment it offers opinion without balance, scope or suggestion of resolution. It should be taken as such and relegated to the pop-news section and forgotten.
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"The baby is the bathwater".
You've fallen into the classic apologists trap.
The simple existence of a god (as opposed to their supposed actions) is unfalsifiable.
An agnostic is someone who believes there is equal weight to each argument & simply hasn't chosen which to support.
I agree with the general sentiment that Trademarks are a simple method of quality control.
It helps verify the trusted developer - If I hear about a new fancy application & fancy giving it a go, I want to know I'm not unknowingly using some adulterated version which would provide undesired results.
As for many distributors strict control over their trademarks: they have no choice.
They have to prove an effort has been made to protect it, else they risk losing it as a generic term.
I used GPL too, but I found it difficult for students to use their work at university later in life when transitioning to software for real life use, a medical software as it is my experience. I found BSD license more flexible, less constraining and better suited for such situations.
Trademarks don't help "verify the trusted developer" much of the time. Consider a Linux distribution called "X Linux" - there are plenty of such distributions but Linus or other core Linux developers have not been involved with that specific distribution. Same applies for alternative implementations of programming languages like, say, IronRuby and IronPython.
I used GPL too, but I found it difficult for students to use their work at university later in life when transitioning to software for real life use, a medical software as it is my experience. I found BSD license more flexible, less constraining and better suited for such situations.
Yep, that sounds like a situation better suited to BSD. I prefer that license, too, for something that is going to be used extensively in business software.. like parsers and such.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
MS fanboys use C#: everyone else uses Java
And Real Programmers use FORTRAN.
tftfy
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Trademark exists to prevent fraud and protect reputation. Unlike data (protected by copyright, patent, and trade secret), reputation cannot be trivially reproduced - the value of a mark derives from its ability to inform, which evaporates if there are no restrictions on what the mark can apply to. While flaws in the current system are sometimes abused, and there is unquestionably room for improvement, the existence of trademark does not geometrically decrease the value in the system (as the other forms of "IP" do). I suspect this is why there is less railing against trademark than against copyright or patent - it's simply *less* broken.
On the one hand it advocates freedom, and [on] the other it takes it away."
Spice gives with one hand and takes away with all of its others
I guess so. However then the platforms won't stay exclusive for long.
I realize that total lack of copyright may be undesirable for many reasons, however the primary reason for GPL was problems that were caused by excessive restrictions imposed by copyright.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That only means that GCC isn't the only compiler that doesn't suck.
BTW, Intel's compiler managed to compile it ok.
Ahh the rallying cry of those who want to freeload off someone else's hard work.
Seriously though, this guy is an idiot. In a broad sense he is all for "freedom" as long as that freedom isn't in the hands of the original developers. As things stand those developing original software have lots of choices in how they send their creation out into the world. They can choose what to do with the source - There's closed source, open source, there's the various open source licences. Same with name they can choose to TM the name or not. And if they do choose to TM it then they can still choose to let people use it. Where's the problem?
From reading TFA it sounds like the guy got his wrists lightly slapped over slapping Ubuntu branding everywhere and now has his panties in a serious bunch. Since when were cry-babies like this news?!?
The impetus behind Dijkstra's original essay was not that GOTO itself was a fundamentally bad language construct. It was that this construct was overused and abused.
Have you even read Dijkstra's paper?
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF
Just to quote the beginning, a bit:
Since a number of years I am familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. Later I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disasterous effects and did I become convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming langauges (i.e. everything except -perhaps- plain machine code). At that time I did not attach too much importance to that discovery; I now submit my considerations for publication because in very recent discussions in which the subject turned up, I have been urged to do so."
Seems pretty clear to me that his intent was that goto statements be eliminated. The paper goes on to explain why in more detail.
We come up with our own Trademark for the open source community. Just like the Open Source community came up with their own way to handle copyrights.
Problem solved
Trademarks could be considered kosher even from a strictly libertarian point of view.
"No force or fraud"? Well, trademark law is about protecting your freedom from fraud by misrepresentation of the origin of goods and services. It's a good thing - at least when it's not enforced in overzealous and creative ways.
Patents and copyrights are about restricting your freedom in return for (allegedly) promoting the arts and sciences.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
So to reiterate and simplify many of the previous posts before I ask my question; Copyright protects development of good or services (preventing loss of investment) and Trademark protects from identity theft. Now that we understand that. So if we equate brand identity to personal identity (true not perfectly equal but close enough for this discussion), then didn't we solve, for most use cases, this problem long ago by the use of sir names in human culture? So the obvious solution is that a trademarked name created by the products original developers could, if the developer opted in or the law was changed, be carried on by subsequent generations forked from the original as long as they included a unique extension. I.E. Firefox, could be forked by another team to bring you Frederick, son of Firefox, or something else suitably ridiculous. And the brand confusion argument would hold little water because we are preprogrammed to understand this nomenclature due to our social structure.