Linux  and Free Software :: Another Damn Small??



Quote (WDef @ Jan. 26 2008,14:40)
I can get to a commandline.

"it doesn't have an X system yet"  .."or any of the features listed on their website"
You're kidding! That explains that.  I was expecting it to boot into X.  How gauche of me.

And, you know what I thought were boot errors, looking like:

Code Sample
acd0: FAILURE - READ - BIG_ILLEGAL REQUEST asc=0x64 ascq=0x00


turns out these AREN'T significant at all - the FreeBSD boot is just "noisy" and prints dozens of errors reading from cdrom that mean nothing at all.  So why print them out?

It's unlikely to have any appeal for me without X.  Perhaps it will improve.
Quote (chaostic @ Jan. 26 2008,22:32)
Quote (lucky13 @ Jan. 26 2008,10:29)
Show me where it's registered.
http://bleedingedgeopensource.blogspot.com/2007....on.html

Show me where it needs to be registered to be a valid trademark.
You're right.
I just read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_trademark_rights
and it says:
Quote
If a trademark has not been registered, some jurisdictions (especially Common Law countries) offer protection for the business reputation or goodwill which attaches to unregistered trademarks through the tort of passing off. Passing off may provide a remedy in a scenario where a business has been trading under an unregistered trademark for many years, and a rival business starts using the same or a similar mark.
Sorry, I didn't get my facts straight.
Quote
If a trademark has not been registered,

The problem in the silly example offered is Linux is already registered. "GNU/Linux" is an attempt by a third party to conjoin or even co-opt an existing mark owned by Linus Torvalds and managed by Linux Mark.

In a way, this insistence of abusing the Linux trademark by conjoining the other project's name to it is similar to the example I gave about Nexenta. Nexenta doesn't append anyone else's name to their own project. They can't use the "Sun" mark in their name because they're a derivative of it; they can't use the Solaris mark in their name because Sun diligently protects their trademarks. You also couldn't put together "Damn Small OpenSolaris" because you would infringe on their trademark for OpenSolaris as well as John's for DSL. You can't print out things that bear the trademarks of Sun. "Without a trademark license, you may not use Solaris or OpenSolaris in the name of your distribution, or any product, service or company name." OpenSolaris-related projects: Nexenta, Belenix, SchilliX.
http://opensolaris.org/os/trademark/

Maybe someone thinks Solaris is somehow "generic" like Linux is. Sun doesn't think so. And Linux Mark exists for the *same* reason: to keep Linux from being or becoming generic.

It's Linus' and Linux Mark's decision what to permit and not permit with respect to his mark. Their mark is NOT diluted and they -- against objections of the primary proponent (RMS) of making people say "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" -- enforce compliance of the trademark. It's also noteworthy that Linus calls the OS "Linux" and not "GNU/Linux." But it doesn't seem to matter to some people.
To clarify:
I quoted the wikipedia article to highlight the fact that although, as far as I know, "Damn Small" hasn't been registered as a trademark, it can still receive a certain degree of protection under the law.

Quote from the article:
Quote
Passing off may provide a remedy in a scenario where a business has been trading under an unregistered trademark for many years, and a rival business starts using the same or a similar mark.
While DSL may not be a commercial entity, it seems that non-profits receive equal protection under (US?) law as for-profits. If so, I assume that the same laws against, e.g. tort, passing off, etc, would apply as well.

I agree that deciding whether a name is generic, or not, isn't a black-and-white question, since different people may form different opinions.
It may be useful to read this section, which explains how the law determines whether or not a trademark has acquired "distinctiveness" (as opposed to being "generic"):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Acquired_distinctiveness

I think there are sufficient other ways to describe a "generic" product in the same class as DSL, all of which would have a more descriptive effect to 'the layman' than "Damn Small Linux".
e.g.
Mini Linux distro
Small-sized LiveCD distro
So, I disagree with the argument that the term "Damn Small" has become genericized when referring to Linux distros.
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