Re: About the Open Source trademark (Was: {bb} Macs, Trends, andThanks!

[Henrik Olsen <henrik@iaeste.dk>]

On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Tuesday 2 February 1999, at 18 h 23, the keyboard of 
> temple@temple.inre.asu.edu wrote:
> 
> > PHP/MySQL DB by Hal Roberts.  Other than the fact that both BB and MOT are
> > very cool open source products, is there a connection?
> 
> #define LAWYER 1
> 

> Open Source is a registered trademark and so cannot be used lightly
> (otherwise, Microsoft would label NT as "open source"). You have to
> comply with the Open Source definition
> <http://www.opensource.org/osd.html> and Big Brother clearly does not:
> 
> - you cannot redistribute it at will (item #1)
> - you cannot distribute modifications without a prior authorization (item #3)
> 
> See <http://MacLawran.ca/bb-dnld/license.html> for details.

#define LAWYER 2
The phrase `Open Source' has been registered as a certification mark.

This means "open source" is NOT the trademark, this does NOT prevent
anyone from describing a piece of software as "open source" since that
is not the mark registered.
Proper capitalisation counts in trademarks.

#undef LAWYER

Apart from that, I agree that BigBrother isn't "Open Source" (the big
definition), though it definitely is open source (the simple description).


-- 
Henrik Olsen,  Dawn Solutions I/S
URL=http://www.iaeste.dk/~henrik/
Get the rest there.

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