Re: XUL or not XUL

Arron Ferguson wrote:
> 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.

    Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. So you probably know what it feels 
like to be the admin for Dark Nova, then. ;)

> 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.

    I wasn't thinking about that, but yeah, that's bound to happen. The 
problem is a symptom of the fact that there are way too many different 
XUILs out there, and the number's only going up. While there's plenty of 
room for several languages to compete, we've already reached saturation.

> 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.

    Funny, I call brown carbonated sugar drinks "colas". That sorta sums 
up my philosophy on the subject. If you have to resort to referring to 
photocopying as "Xeroxing" and microwaving as "Radar Ranging", you're 
probably missing something important.

> 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.

    I think you've hit the heart of why the "XUL Alliance" won't change 
their name: They don't think Mozilla has the stones to take them to 
court. Actually, Mozilla could theoretically succeed, either in court or 
via the threat thereof. Adobe trademarked "Illustrator". Microsoft 
succeeded in forcing Lindows to change its name to Linspire because of 
their "Windows" trademark. And the XUL Alliance is most likely unable to 
withstand long-term litigation.

    However, the Mozilla Foundation has two problems. The first is that 
it may make itself look more like Microsoft or SCO in the eyes of the 
open source community if it drags the XUL Alliance into court. The 
second is that it has limited financial and legal resources that it may 
need elsewhere.

    For the moment, Gerald is probably safe, but if the Mozilla 
Foundation gets a sudden influx of funding, or if they decide to raise 
the profile of their XUL-related technologies, I think you'd see letters 
from their lawyers getting mailed. Personally, I'm surprised the 
Alliance hasn't changed it's name for the purpose of being taken more 
seriously, which is hard to do when you're very name is a blatant 
trademark violation. In fact, their strongest defense in court is that 
Mozilla has allowed them to get away with it for this long.


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