Trademark vs Copyright
Today, Sun Microsystem announced that Java is going to be free, released under the GPL. That's amazing news, but I'd like to talk about another thing here.
Duke, the Java mascot, is also being freed, under BSD license. Sun Microsystems is proving here that a trademarked logo can be free as in speech.
The Mozilla Corporation could take a lesson, here.
2006-11-13 21:27:58+0900
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2006-11-14 00:36:31+0900
I’m sure Mozilla can take a lesson from the open-sourcing of the Java Coffee Cup Logo, yeah.
Oh.
2006-11-14 01:09:12+0900
Not only that, but Duke is way cooler than the planet-humper…
2006-11-14 02:50:09+0900
Rubbish. It’s literally exactly the same situation. The mascot matters not one jot. One cannot call one’s Java runtime a “java runtime” without Sun’s approval. The mascot matters not.
But hell, keep it up. Debian is about a year from utter obsolescence at this point thanks to obnoxious DDs, so anything that hastens this will benefit those who have settled on Ubuntu already (such as, y’know, Sun).
– Chris
2006-11-14 05:47:27+0900
I doubt you could give the “Duke” logo away, so what does it matter what licence it’s under. And wtf is it (a gnome? an extracted molar? a marshmallow?)
Debian Swirly, Firefox, Coffee Cup: those are obviously (to me) good logos, and worth protecting.
Duke: it barely rates a mention on wikipedia, with no explanation of what it is. Compare to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Firefox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippy
I read something about Duke here from ’99 –> http://java.sun.com/features/1999/05/duke.html
Apparently, he presaged Clippy. WOW! And he had great fun protecting his trademark! Riot!
2006-11-14 09:26:54+0900
Chris, those who don’t care of software being free are, well, free to use a non-free operating system, such as Ubuntu or Microsoft Windows.
2006-11-14 10:44:05+0900
Chris Cunningham: could you share your wisdom and explain how the hell the death of Debian that you so realistically predict would benefit Ubuntu ? Would the disappearance of most Universe packages help ? Would it help if less people were working on Main packages that get included in Ubuntu every so often ? If this is really the case, Ubuntu may just stop using Debian packages. It’s a pity there are so many Ubuntu users like you, I believe developers are a lot wiser.
2006-11-14 13:06:41+0900
As a number of ex-DDs (and basically all potential NMs these days) have figured out, there’s nothing stopping people from packaging software for Universe themselves, directly, instead of trying to work with an intermediary upstream which spends 60% of its time publicly annoying people.
I’m amazed nobody on planet debian has yet publicly decried some random build / legal / community issue relating to Sun’s code drop. After the JRE was officially packaged it was all of ten minutes before people were fighting tooth and nail to reject it.
– Chris
2006-11-15 05:16:58+0900
Mike, can you plot the number of responses for each post on this blog? I think there will be large spikes for those related to firefox branding stuff ;)