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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: KOfficeSource and KOffice
From:       "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo () kde ! org>
Date:       2008-01-14 19:17:46
Message-ID: 200801141217.49127.aseigo () kde ! org
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On Monday 14 January 2008, Bart Coppens wrote:
> On Monday 14 January 2008 17:45, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > Regardless of the fact that I still do not believe KOffice should be
> > > trademarkable at all,
> >
> > why?
>
> I still believe 'KOffice' resembles the generic 'Office' too closely (for
> an Office Suite). I mean, OpenOffice, StarOffice, etc, they at least add a
> word in front of it. Apparently Apple gets away with this kind of 'single
> letter prefix-trademarking', but I still think it is 'wrong' that it is
> possible (blame my naive worldview) :-)

ah, ok, i see where you are coming from. unfortunately / fortunately 
(depending who you are =) there are legal definitions for this. 

as an aside, trademark law is actually very non-evil and easy to understand, 
unlike much of copyright and patent law (other forms of "intellectual" 
property law). it seems to be based very much on rational and sensible case 
law and legislation. which is almost astounding in this day and age ;)

> > ah, you mean it should have a liberal licensing program? well, the
> > problem right now is we have no outwardly visible licensing program. we
> > do need to fix that.
>
> Yes, and yes.

=)

> > who would do the evaluation?
>
> Obviously active KOffice people should participate, perhaps assisted by
> some KDE eV people. This would become a problem if all active KOffice
> developers would be employed by the company, though, since it would lose
> any objectivity an evaluation might ask for.

ok ... so some sort of trademark oversight committee made up of a mix of the 
stakeholder parties. so noted ...

> > what would constitute "significant damage"?
>
> For example, MS contracts them to write a closed-source set of KOffice
> filters for OOXML, and then would release some press fluff about how these
> filters are better than ODF import or so. (Unlikely to happen given that
> even KWord is GPLed these days, but it's an example.)

ok, so a code of conduct regarding free software, open standards and the 
common goals of the KDE and KOffice projects. so noted ...

(if you can't tell, we (the e.V. board) are on a fact finding mission. i'm not 
the only one here, either, Cornelius is also participating and on this list.)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech

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