There were Maemo and Moblin platforms from Nokia and Intel respectively. They both merged to form the Meego project under the governance of the Linux Foundation. Distributions such as openSUSE, Fedora, Debian tried to spin off Meego based derivatives and faced a lot of troubles.
Well known openSUSE rockstar Andrew Wafaa, overcame some of these troubles and did a distro release using these Meego packages on top of an openSUSE image. He named this distro "Smeegol" => SuSE + Meego. This effort by Andrew (and other distros) is a step in bringing the cool, shiny features of MeeGo to the masses, by riding on the large user-base of the existing distros. However, this has not went well with the linux foundation and they have asked to change the name of the project. They were afraid that Andrew using "Smeegol" will dilute the brand image of Meego.
Let us take a different case. "Linux " is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. If he has decided that nobody should be using the name "Linux" in their projects, We may not be able to use names such as "RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)", "SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLED/S)" etc. Allowing other people to use the name "Linux" (with due credits of course) has given it a widespread popularity. The Linux Foundation seems to be missing this point altogether and insists to move away from using {M,m}-e-e-{G,g}-o or any subset of those letters or sounds in that order, alone or in combination with other letters, words or marks that would tend to cause someone to make a reasonable connection of the reference with the MeeGo mark.
There are two problems here:
1) Anyone who hears about Smeegol will think about "Lord of the Rings" and not Meego. So, this should not affect LinuxFoundation at all. However, an even bigger problem is:
2) Should Linux Foundation take such a hard stand on maintaining the exclusivity of the "MeeGo " brand ?
With Android grabbing significant market share every day, I wonder why Linux Foundation insists on not playing well with the distros, with respect to Meego. There is a tweet from well-known kernel Hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman also expressing his unhappiness. However, it is not all gloomy and I believe that the linux foundation will fix these problems soonish.
Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are purely personal.
8 comments:
When I first read your article - and saw that it referred to "Smeegol" - I expected that it was about the J.R.R. Tolkein Estate invoking their trademark against the owner of the Smeegol distribution. They have already invoked trademark against those who would use Elvish and other languages created for the Lord of the Rings.
I don't see that the Linux Foundation would have much legal basis for their complaints in the U.S.
Holy Lord and the thousand Rings!!!
What else i'm going to read despite these "trademark" issues....
Thank god egocentric Linus cared much more about his code rather than his _brand_ ....
That's all folks, now i have to go....
Meeeeegoooooooo... :-S
For me the problem here is essentially a bait-and-switch on the part of Nokia and (especially) Intel. Meego, and more to the point Moblin, was initially touted as much as a *desktop* as it was a distribution (or probably more a desktop). The idea of a restrictive trademark policy for a desktop makes no sense, because a desktop can't realistically be self-distributing.
Fedora has a somewhat restrictive trademark program - you can't just call any old vaguely-Fedora-derived collection of packages Fedora - as do most distros (Mandriva, Ubuntu, SUSE etc). This makes sense, as a distribution is, well, a *distribution*: its primary value and source of identity is its particular composition of bits, so other organizations varying the composition of bits and using the same name isn't a particularly desirable thing from any POV.
Firefox has a similarly restrictive policy, and again, a reasonable argument can be made for it; you can get Firefox direct from Mozilla, and that should be the definitive form of Firefox, and it's reasonable for them to ask that anything that varies too far from that definition not be called 'Firefox' by anyone else.
But it makes no sense for a desktop. No-one goes to GNOME.org to download GNOME, or to KDE.org to download KDE. Would it make any sense at all for the GNOME Foundation to try and stop distributions calling GNOME GNOME and instead ship their GNOME packages under some other name? Of course it wouldn't. It wouldn't benefit either side and it'd just be silly.
Having a restrictive trademark policy makes sense if you're thinking of Meego-the-distribution, just as it makes sense for Fedora or Ubuntu or Mandriva. But if you're thinking of Meego-the-desktop, it makes no sense at all.
Aggressively pursuing these trademark claims effectively renders Meego-the-desktop non-viable, because no-one can provide Meego-the-desktop as distinct from Meego-the-distribution. And it's perfectly reasonable to call out Meego and the Linux Foundation for doing that. If what they want is for Meego to be only a distribution and not a desktop, they need to be more clear about it, and stop trying to have their cake and eat it too by saying 'sure, you can implement the Meego desktop in your desktop, just change all the names and do this other ludicrous stuff'. If they truly want Meego to be a desktop as well as a distribution, it needs a more liberal trademark policy. The best way to achieve this would probably be to rename either the distro or the desktop so they don't both have the same name, and different trademark policies can be applied to each.
Adam: Let us hope, things gets fixed soon.
Yep; of course there are some issues. MeeGo is a young distro and very much still finding it's feet.
I think many people involved in MeeGo are rather surprised by how strict the Linux Foundation (not MeeGo) are being with the mark.
On 'Smeegol' I don't think Suse would like a new distro to take large parts of Suse and call it "Ssused" so that makes sense to me.
Where MeeGo has screwed up bigtime is in using the mark indiscriminately in package names, UX names and other places.
Adam is right: MeeGo should follow Canonical/Ubuntu's lead when they used the distinct Unity name and create sensible names for the various UX desktops which are currently named "Netbook UX", "IVI UX", "Handset UX" ... ewww
Dear Sankar,
I am not going to comment on the "exact substance of your blog", but rather clarify a bit on the registration matter of "LINUX" by Linus! He did not register it and would not have but for a bkack-heart American who claimed royalties from Linux based applications on the 15th of August 1994 (incidentally the Independence month and date of India) and which Linus had to fight it out and won eventually. To avoid such probs. in the future,he registered it and transferred the issues of licensing to LMI---Linus Mark institution, whch is now not charging a centor penny for using the Linux OS or Kernel.
Dear Sankar,
Sorry for the "typer's devils" in my previous post.
lbt: I believe LF should've clarified that they intend to promote meego as a distro and not as a platform, as Adam explained.
Sreedhav: Ah okay. Thanks for the explanation :-)
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