what does semi-external mean to the common man [ was: Re: was there an advertised ETA for the next beta?]

[Jef Spaleta]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

>What do you mean by "semi-external"?  Our general idea _is_ to make
>this like openoffice.org is to Sun, I think, at least in many ways.

Hmm..the trademark policy issue surrounding the red hat branded objects
in rhlp makes my head hurt. StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are distinctly
different trademarkable brands. Somehow I doubt RHL-"the project" and
RHL-"the release" has the same clear distinction in the trademark
space.  The again trademark issues surrounding any brandable open
project makes my head hurt. What's to stop OpenOffice.org from deciding
to take the view that commercial distros could not use the
OpenOffice.org brandname or logos when marketing distro "features" SOT
Linux for example has its own SOT Office which claims OpenOffice.org
compatibility, but doesn't claim to be based on OpenOffice.org. If
OpenOffice ever developed a trademark guideline RHL-"the release" might
have to call its software RHL-Office just to keep up with trademark
guidelines. Of course OpenOffice.org is a bad example at this point,
because you have to aggressively defend trademarks for them to be
enforceable...yadda yadda yadda. And of course I ain't no
lawyer...trying to explain the legal specifics of how this is all going
to work is just going to make my head hurt worse.

Continuing to use the OpenOffice.org example though.....my general
feeling is that OpenOffice.org existence as its own trademark 'brand' is
part of what makes it feel like its a "semi-external" project. Similarly
with the old example of netscape and mozilla...very different trademarks
there to.  It might be silly, but RHL-"the project" might need to be
devoid or Red Hat specific trademarks to give it the same feel as
something like OpenOffice.org as a community project.

   
-jef"thinks its going to be interesting to see how Red Hat updates its
trademark guidelines to account for RHL-"the project" and the fact that
OEM's selling boxen with RHL preinstalled, won't have box sets to resell
any longer"spaleta 
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