Re: Licensing issues (Was: [Announce] Mneson : persistent untyped graphs)

[Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com>]

O.K. Fair enough. But I didn't really want to talk about the 
technicalities of the law - rather the intent. If a term is commonly 
used in a given context, the law isn't going to let you trademark it 
except under possibly some very limited circumstances. The reason is 
that nobody wants to start prohibiting people from using common 
terminology or it starts abridging free speech, becomes impossible to 
police, etc. Consider when Al Franken got sued by Fox TV over use of 
"Fair and Balanced" - Fox got laughed out of court. You can't go around 
prohibiting somebody from using certain words because you don't like the 
way they use them.

As for "Open Source"? What if I put up a website with my definition of 
"Open Source"? Does that make it somehow "official" and allow me to 
insist that anyone using the term do so only if it meets my definition? 
What's the difference between me and OSI? Is it that they are more guys? 
Is it that they have more money? Is it that their web site was up first? 
I don't think any of that would carry much weight in court seeing as how 
people were calling things "Open Source" long before OSI showed up.

I don't have a problem with people wanting to be clear about what they 
mean when describing their software or anything else. I just don't think 
its right to tell someone they can't use some terminology to describe 
their software because it doesn't satisfy someone else who put up a web 
site. Where would we be if we tried to police the same thing with 
respect to calling some body of software "Object Oriented"? Who gets to 
decide the meaning of that term and decide if someone's software meets 
the proper conditions?

MDC


David Starner wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 11:54:52 +0000, Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
> 
>>Yeah, except under law (and for good reason) nobody can claim ownership 
>>of "Open Source" until they pay to have the "(tm)" put next to it. 
> 
> 
> No; the (tm) is free; it's the (R) that you have to pay for.


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