Re: XUL or not XUL
Arron Ferguson <[email protected]> Fri, 14 Jan 2005 11:01:08 -0800
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.lang.xul.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <OF211673B5.56111706-ON88256F89.00687962-88256F89.0068796A@bcit.ca> |
Matthew, Some good points. It's going to be interesting how this is handled. I noticed that along side Xeotrope XUI and my Purnama XUI is another XUI project from JWay. So far I've not received any e-mails from either but probably because my project isn't very active and hence not much of a threat to either of these companies. You're right. At some point it's going to get ugly with some of the projects/companies having turf wars and fighting over the names. Peronally I tend to treat the acronyms as technologies but pointing out specific "brand names" within the technology - much like we all seem to refer to Coke/Pepsi/Brand X as Coke rather than saying "brown carbonated sugar drink". By doing this one is able to look at the broader picture. Having said that, I suspect that if Mozilla was to attempt to hall anyone into court over the XUL name, they would encounter the same issues and legal wranglings that Sun had to deal with when they attempted to trademark JDBC. Trademarking an acronym that stands for a technology would probably be quite difficult to do in the U.S. or the E.U. Have you come across any interesting cases in either the U.S. or E.U. on this issue? I haven't seen anything interesting in this area lately. Just curious. Arron [email protected] wrote: ----- >From: Matthew Raymond >Arron Ferguson wrote: >> XUL is a technology, not a brand name. > > It's both. Companies trademark the names of their technologies all > >the time. > >> XUI is a technology (the same >> type of technology as a XUL) not a brand name. > > I'm not sure the software vendor Xoetrope, who lists XUI as one of >its "products", would agree with you. > >> Gerald is right in >> calling it XUL. Mozilla cannot claim XUL as a brand name since it >is an >> acronym that represents a technology, not a brand name. > > Mozilla originated the term, they claim it as a copyright, and >members of the Mozilla Foundation have attempted to discourage its >use >as a generic term. What else can they do other than haul people into >court? ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by: Beat the post-holiday blues Get a FREE limited edition SourceForge.net t-shirt from ThinkGeek. It's fun and FREE -- well, almost....http://www.thinkgeek.com/sfshirt