[MeeGo-dev] Trademark compliance, name usage, etc.

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Greg KH <gregkh at suse.de> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 04:23:30PM +0200, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> Just because connman is a small component and has a fairly self-contained API
>> and predictable behaviour, it's not an exception to the rule. You must use the
>> components, all of them, in the same versions.
>
> Ah, so the same will be said for banshee and evolution as well?  Oh
> wait, I see people replacing them already and no one putting up such a
> stink.  Now why is that...
>
>> If an exception to connman is opened, then another will turn up for
>> bash, one for uclibc, and so forth, to the point that it fragments the
>> stack.
>
> Sounds good to me :)
>
> Seriously, the main issue here is the insistance that one must follow
> the rules, only to have the question "what are the rules" be answered as
> "we are still trying to figure that out, wait a few months."

Also it seems that the rules are being put in place so application
writers that write apps for the proprietary app store will have a
guarantee to work on all MeeGo variants but Fedora at least has no
interest in supporting the proprietary store and won't support it. In
that regard I can see why they want to have the guaranteed API but it
shows that there should be the equivalent to the Fedora secondary
"Fedora Remix" [1] trademark that allows us to credit the upstream
work but also indicate that we're not 100% compliant so if the user
wants things like the app store they should go elsewhere. Sort of like
what happens with Android and their market place.

> That doesn't work for a product that is currently shipping.
>
> And, to answer the private question a few people have asked me, "why are
> you asking all of these questions, why not just not use the MeeGo name
> at all?"  Well, it's about recognizing the contributions of those that
> you build something on.  I know not all people/companies do that all the
> time (present drivers of MeeGo included), but some of us want to do the
> "right thing" here.
>
> Unfortunately, they are making it impossible for us to do so, so I'm
> thinking that you will start to see "netbook" like respins of Fedora and
> openSUSE and other distros that might happen to look like they came from
> the MeeGo codebase, but not mention MeeGo at all.  Sad it's had to come
> to this.

Agreed. See some of my comments above.

Peter

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Secondary_trademark_usage_guidelines