Trademarks and their limits

By Jonathan Corbet
February 5, 2013

A user looking for the Firefox browser on a Debian system may come away confused; seemingly, that program is not shipped by Debian. In truth, the desired software is there; it just goes under the name "iceweasel." This confusing naming is a result of the often controversial intersection of free software and trademarks. Critics claim that trademarks can remove some of the freedoms that should come with free software, while proponents assert that trademarks are needed to protect users from scam artists and worse. A look at the activity around free office suites tends to support the latter group — but it also shows the limits of what trademarks can accomplish.

The core idea behind a trademark is that it gives the owner the exclusive right to apply the trademarked name to a product or service. Thus, for example, the Mozilla Foundation owns the trademark for the name Firefox as applied to "computer programs for accessing and displaying files on both the internet and the intranet"; a quick search on the US Patent and Trademark Office site shows other owners of the name for use with skateboards, bicycles, wristwatches, power tools, and vehicular fire suppression systems. Within the given domain, the Mozilla Foundation has the exclusive right to control which programs can be called "Firefox". The Foundation's trademark policy has been seen by some as being overly restrictive (almost no patches can be applied to an official release without losing the right to the name); that is why Debian's browser is called "Iceweasel" instead. But those same restrictions allow the Mozilla Foundation to stop distribution of a program called "Firefox" that sends credit card numbers to a third party.

The Document Foundation (TDF) owns a trademark on "LibreOffice" in the US, while the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) owns "Apache OpenOffice" and "OpenOffice.org". Both foundations have established trademark usage policies (TDF, ASF) intended to ensure that users downloading their software are getting what they expect: the software released by the developers, without added malware. Without this protection, it is feared, the net would quickly be filled with corrupted versions of Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice that would barrage users with ads or compromise their systems outright.

How effective is this protection? To a degree, trademarks are clearly working. Reports of systems compromised by corrupt versions of free office suites are rare; when somebody attempts to distribute malware versions, trademarks give the foundations the ability to get malware distributors shut down relatively quickly. It seems hard to dispute that the application of trademark law has helped to make the net a somewhat safer place.

Questionable distributors

One might ask: safer from whom? Consider, for example, a company called "Tightrope Interactive." Tightrope was sued by VideoLan.org (the developers of the VLC media player) and Geeknet (the operators of SourceForge) in 2010; they were accused of "trademark infringement, cyberpiracy and violating California's consumer protection law against spyware". Tightrope had been distributing "value-added" versions of VLC from its site at vlc.us.com; it was one of many unwanted VLC redistributors during that time. That litigation was settled in 2011; the terms are mostly private, but they included the transfer of vlc.us.com over to VideoLan.org, ending the use of that channel by Tightrope.

On Friday, April 15, 2011, Oracle announced that OpenOffice.org would be turned into a "community project" of an (at that point) unspecified nature. On April 18 — the next business day — Tightrope Interactive filed for ownership of the OpenOffice trademark in the US. That application was eventually abandoned, but not willingly; as Apache OpenOffice contributor Rob Weir recently noted in passing, "It took some special effort and legal work to get that application rejected." Companies in this sort of business clearly see the value in controlling that kind of trademark; had Tightrope Interactive been successful, it would have been able to legally distribute almost any software under the name "OpenOffice." The fact that the project successfully defended the trademark in this case should impede the distribution of corrupted versions of Apache OpenOffice in the future.

Sample OpenOffice ads

Or so one would hope. Your editor's daughter recently acquired a laptop computer which, alas, appears to be destined to run a proprietary operating system. After looking for an office suite for this machine, she quickly came asking for help: which version should she install? In fact, one need not search for long before encountering ads like those shown to the right: there is, it seems, no shortage of sites offering versions of OpenOffice and paying for ad placement on relevant searches. One of those — openoffice.us.com — just happens to be run by the same folks at Tightrope Interactive.

A quick search of the net will turn up complaints (example) about unwanted toolbars and adware installed by redistributed versions of OpenOffice, including Tightrope's version. This apparently happens often enough that the Apache OpenOffice project felt the need to put up a page on how to safely download the software, saying:

When we at the Apache OpenOffice project receive reports like this -- and we receive them a couple of times every week -- the first thing I ask is, "Where did you download OpenOffice from?" In today's case, when the user checked his browser's history he found what I suspected, that it was not downloaded from www.openoffice.org, but was a modified version, from another website, that was also installing other applications on his system, programs that in the industry are known as "adware", "spyware" or "malware".

This problem is not restricted to Apache OpenOffice; a search for LibreOffice will turn up a number of similar sites. Given that, one might well wonder whether trademarks are actually living up to the hopes that have been placed on them. Isn't this kind of abusive download site just the sort of thing that trademarks were supposed to protect us from?

One answer to that question can be found on one of the LibreOffice download sites, where it is noted that clicking on the "Download" button will start with the "DomaIQ" installer. This bit of software is described in these terms:

DomaIQ™ is an install manager which will manage the installation of your selected software. Besides handling the installation of your selected software, DomaIQ™ can make suggestions for additional free software that you may be interested in. Supplemental software could include toolbars, browser add-ons, game apps, and other types of applications.

Herein lies the rub. The version of Apache OpenOffice or LibreOffice offered by these sites is, most likely, entirely unmodified; they may well be shipping the binary version offered by the project itself. But the handy "installer" program that runs first will happily install a bunch of unrelated software at the same time; by all accounts, the "suggestions" for "additional free software" tend to be hard to notice — and hard to opt out of. So users looking for an office suite end up installing rather more software than they had intended, and that software can be of a rather unfriendly nature. Once these users find themselves deluged with ads — or worse — they tend to blame the original development project, which had nothing to do with the problem.

The purveyors of this software are in complete compliance with the licensing and trademark policies for the software they distribute; at least, those that continue to exist for any period of time are. That software is unmodified, links to the source are provided, and so on. What they are doing is aggregating the software with the real payload in a way that is quite similar to what Linux distributors do. Any attempt to use trademark policies to restrict this type of aggregation would almost certainly bite Linux distributors first.

Consider an example: a typical Linux distribution advertises the fact that it includes an office suite; it also comes with an installer that can install software that presents advertisements to the user (the music stores incorporated into media players, for example, or Amazon search results from Unity), phones home with hardware information (Fedora's Smolt) or exposes the system to external compromise (Java browser plugins). It is hard to imagine a trademark policy that could successfully block the abuses described in this article while allowing Linux distributors to continue to use the trademarked names. Free software projects are generally unwilling to adopt trademark policies of such severity.

As a result, there is little that the relevant projects can do; neither copyright nor trademark law can offer much help in this situation. That is why these projects are reduced to putting up pages trying to educate users about where the software should actually be downloaded from. The conclusion that one might draw is that trademarks are only partially useful for the purpose of protecting users. They can be used as a weapon against the distribution of overtly compromised versions of free software programs, but they cannot guarantee that any given distribution is safe to install. There is still no substitute, it seems, for taking the time to ensure that one's software comes from a reliable source.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 1:57 UTC (Wed) by waucka (guest, #63097) [Link] (4 responses)

Hm...if somebody is redistributing your software along with adware, spyware, or other malware, couldn't that be construed as libel or slander? After all, they are unfairly tarnishing your reputation. I suppose when organizations are involved instead of individuals, though, all you have to go on is trademarks.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 16:24 UTC (Wed) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (1 responses)

Hm, that might make for an interesting avenue of attack for a particularly daring attorney, but as you said it might be tricky when it's an organization's product being tarnished. Perhaps you could get one of the more prominent authors to claim that it was besmirching his good name by giving people the impression that he was in some small part responsible for the adware?

Of course that would also depend on the litigation happening in a place where libel suits aren't incredibly difficult to win in and of themselves (and from what I understand, the US is not such a place.)

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:18 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

The fact that it's an organization being defamed instead of an individual is not a problem. While the protection against statements that hurt your personal relationships wouldn't apply (the classic example is accusing a woman of being promiscuous), the usual case (the only one possible in many jurisdictions) is a statement that hurts your business relationship. That would apply to something like OpenOffice.

But I'm pretty sure slander and libel laws have never been used for things other than direct statements about the subject. Preventing someone from tarnishing your reputation by selling inferior products is exactly what trademark law is for.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 14, 2013 11:32 UTC (Thu) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (1 responses)

> couldn't that be construed as libel or slander?

It could perhaps be construed as a violation of your "moral rights" under the Berne Convention:

http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.ht...

"the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation."

(Suggestion: don't waive your moral rights in your free software license if you don't want this to happen!)

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 14, 2013 11:37 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Jurisdictions that pay more than lip service to the moral-rights clauses tend to treat such waivers as inherently invalid.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 2:18 UTC (Wed) by onlooker_905 (guest, #64072) [Link] (16 responses)

Just as an aside: the name Microsoft is trademarked, legally, by a manufacturer of pillows and quilts in Melbourne, Australia. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/22/1074732518877.html

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 6:20 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (15 responses)

That's fine, trademarks are limited in scope so it's possible to have a trademarked "Linux" window cleaner _and_ an operating system.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 9:15 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (11 responses)

> That's fine, trademarks are limited in scope

One famous example was the name "VAX" which was a brand of vacuum cleaners - and computers, of course. There was a lawsuit, I think, and the court said that confusion of large computing machinery with household appliance is unlikely, so there is no infringement. One other result of that is a marketing slogan "nothing sucks like the VAX" applied to the computer ;)

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 9:38 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (7 responses)

Actually the marketing slogan used to be »Nothing sucks like an Electrolux« (which rhymes better). Electrolux and VAX are competing vacuum cleaner brands.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 8:19 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (6 responses)

The use of "sucks" in that Electrolux ad campaign was only in the UK during the early 1990s (source: http://adland.tv/content/nothing-sucks-ad-myth) - at least at that time, "sucks" was not widely used with a pejorative meaning, and it wasn't run in the US.

These days, UKians are somewhat Internet-savvy and have absorbed many US meanings such as this one. Although it seems the Oxford English Dictionary has much earlier UK usages, but they were not so common: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=583268

This has been a PedantryForFun announcement...

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 10:27 UTC (Thu) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (5 responses)

I counter your pedantry.

As early as 1987, the Stanley Kubrick film _Full Metal Jacket_ was promoted with a poster which featured in prominent type:

IN VIETNAM
THE WIND DOESN'T BLOW
IT SUCKS

Kubrick had been a resident of the U.K. for over 15 years at that point and was infamously involved in every aspect of his films' production, marketing/promotion, and distribution.

If an old fuddy-duddy like Kubrick could be persuaded of the utility of this slang by 1987, it surely must have had currency in the U.K. by the 1990s.

You sure that Electrolux ad campaign wasn't a bit of sardonicism?

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 10:39 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, Full Metal Jacket was a film about US soldiers set in Vietnam, so it's not so surprising it used American slang in the poster. Doesn't really prove it either way.

I really don't think Electrolux would have paid for a poster campaign designed to say it was crap...

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 10:48 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

Sarcastic self-deprecation in advertising is not, in fact, unheard of.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 10:54 UTC (Thu) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (1 responses)

...particularly when said self-deprecating sardonicism is tucked behind one fork of a double entendre.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 17:43 UTC (Thu) by hpa (guest, #48575) [Link]

It was very much intended (this is pretty well documented by now.) Not only that, but it was apparently quite successful in getting people to remember the otherwise fairly heavyweight brand name.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 4:00 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Avis had "We try harder [because we're not first]" for a while. I think they might have changed it by now because it seems that people figured "and it's still not enough to make you first".

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 9:41 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> the court said that confusion of large computing machinery with household appliance is unlikely

I still remember the VAX-750 with those large disk drives (they must have held hundreds of megabytes!) and the day some joker placed a box of "Drive" brand laundry detergent on one of them. I'd say that from a distance it was easy to confuse an RP06 disk drive with a washing machine. Maybe not a vacuum cleaner, but certainly a house-hold appliance.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 17:07 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

I have seen plenty of examples, so many that I have thought about starting a gallery: Novell coffee, UNIX and Firefox fire extinguishers come to mind.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 14, 2013 0:10 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Linux washing powder ...

Cheers,
Wol

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 10:15 UTC (Wed) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, there's Linux:
http://www.sbyte.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/10/06...
Here's Unix
http://www.myhappening.com/photos/barcelona/041220/ps/ima...
And of course Microsoft:
http://www.linenorders.com/mito.html

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 23:15 UTC (Wed) by roman (guest, #24157) [Link] (1 responses)

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/otherunix.html

And... I have somewhere a photocopy of a label from "Unix Porto" (port wine).

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 21, 2013 19:10 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

And there is Ubuntu Cola, of course.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 2:58 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

In your final example trademarks are useful as they set a bright line around what is and what is not part of the product the user intended to download. This greatly simplifies prosecution for misleading conduct under your jurisdiction's consumer protection laws.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 7:10 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

Please consider not actually linking to shady sites like the one you quoted terms and conditions from. Spell out the link in text, but don't give them the value of a link from LWN.

links that do not boost page rank

Posted Feb 8, 2013 13:44 UTC (Fri) by DonDiego (guest, #24141) [Link]

Alternatively, add 'rel="nofollow"' to the anchor tag and Google will note that you merely link to and do not condone the site.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 10:54 UTC (Wed) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (5 responses)

What may be useful here is a regular full integrity report of installed software, à la tripwire. You know the kind of thing security guys do to try to spot trojan horses, etc. It just needs (a lot) of polishing to present such information to end users; but it would teach them more efficiently to stop clicking on "yes" all the time than replying to their email complaints.
Open source systems also have a definitive advantage here in order to spot unsigned program binaries.

Thanks for giving such an opportunity to advertise security as a feature more than a nuisance for the end user...

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 13:17 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (4 responses)

On windows tools like this have existed for a long time. SpyBot, AdAware, etc, etc.. They alert the user who runs them to toolbars, search plugins and other suspcisious-if-not-outright-harmful things. It's useful for cleaning up systems but as a preventative measure... you can't fix stupid.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 12:48 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not wise to think that all victims are stupid.

Some are just different: children, elders or simply vulnerable due to external reasons. Theey deserve better protection and certainly a different set of information than us hackers.

But nethertheless, I intend to benefit too from an occasional automated security survey because I am sure I can find an attacker smarter than me. Don't you?

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 12:56 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

> But nethertheless, I intend to benefit too from an occasional automated security survey because I am sure I can find an attacker smarter than me.
For the people who proactively install, run and heed the reports from such tools there is no problem. It's the people who won't install it, won't run it or won't read the reports that you can't do anything about. For them prevention is out the window, recovery afterwards is all you can strive for.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:44 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

It's not wise to think that all victims are stupid.
Some are just different: children, elders or simply vulnerable due to external reasons.

Those are all just kinds of stupid.

A better point to make would be 1) you can fix a problem caused by stupidity; or 2) a person doesn't deserve to be a victim because he is stupid.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:45 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

It's not wise to think that all victims are stupid.

Everyone's stupid some of the time. More usefully: "It's not wise to think that all victims were being stupid."

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 12:54 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Of course on Windows the legitimate "trusted" vendors engage in this same sort of scam, the official Oracle Java installer is a flaky "expects privileges but forgets to ask for them" half-arsed piece of software that by default replaces your search engine and installs other crap on your PC.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 17:47 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (3 responses)

I think it should be clarified that:
1) Debian users are unlikely to be confused: iceweasel includes a script /usr/bin/firefox

2) the foremost reason Debian renamed firefox is that the trademark license required the package to contains non-free logos. So in a way, no trademarked version of firefox is free software.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 17:54 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

"Non-free" may be unclear here. You're free to modify and distribute modified versions, providing that in doing so you don't infringe upon Mozilla's trademarks - and one of the conditions of the trademark license is that the trademarks only be applied to builds from approved source code.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 22:10 UTC (Wed) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link] (1 responses)

A long time ago, it was the case that the Firefox logo files were non-free in a copyright sense, but it is no longer true, and has not been for some years.

Gerv

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 10:52 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

Maybe, but now, if someone were to rename iceweasel executable to firefox, or the desktop files, I would probably be lost for some time.

Case example: Audacity

Posted Feb 6, 2013 21:53 UTC (Wed) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (1 responses)

I just finished a long process of rebuilding a Windows system "from scratch" because a user installed a version of Audacity that had been corrupted with all sorts of virii, malware, adware, browser redirects, and I'm pretty certain a keylogger too.

The problem isn't the Audacity project itself. The problem is that it's becoming easy for shady organizations to fool users into installing their subverted version.

Trademarks do present some minor risks to software freedoms (making it harder to use freedoms), but they also provide real benefits without actually preventing users and developers from using their freedoms. So while I understand Debian's stance, I think there are some very good reasons to have and use trademarks for FLOSS projects.

Case example: Audacity

Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:54 UTC (Fri) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]

> So while I understand Debian's stance, I think there are some very good
> reasons to have and use trademarks for FLOSS projects.

I can't tell if the original commenter knows this or not, but from the comment it's easy to misunderstand so I'll mention that Debian as an organization is not anti-trademark, as can be seen from the fact that Debian also owns trademarks and has a policy for them (which isn't "do anything you want"): http://www.debian.org/trademark.en.html

Debian is also currently working on a policy for incoming trademarks to make it easier to decide what is acceptable (this is a fairly practical consideration, like "can we patch this to provide security support for the duration of a stable release" and such) and what should trigger a rename to remove the trademark.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 22:11 UTC (Wed) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link] (4 responses)

Mozilla has had some success chasing this sort of shady behaviour. See these articles on my blog:

http://blog.gerv.net/?s=Protecting+Germans&submit=Search

Gerv

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 1:28 UTC (Thu) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, exactly. The problem here isn't trademark law - it gives you the tools needed to do this, albeit imperfectly. The problem is having the resources to do use trademark law to do enforcement, which (at the moment) Mozilla does and OOo/LO do not.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 19:42 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link] (2 responses)

The trick, I think, is not to focus exclusively on the trademark use in the download, since as Jon points out, they could just be distributing the exact same version of the product, but with the malware in the form of "installer" in front.

Instead, look at the trademark use that is involved in their paid ad placement on Google, or Bing, or spam in Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Without this, they have no easy way to lure users to their site. That trademark use is less innocent.

These entry points are easier to deal with, since, for example, Google will remove certain kinds of ads based on complaints from trademark owners. Bing has similar options. I suspect Twitter, Facebook, etc., do as well.

So having ownership of a trademark has value even if you never are in court, since ownership permits you to make these kinds of complaints. Malware sitting off on the web someplace is far less of a concern if it is not the first hit when you search for a popular open source package.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 19:46 UTC (Thu) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

Right, though tackling the search engines is still time-consuming to start and keep up with. Resources, unfortunately, are needed - though not as much as a lawsuit.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 14, 2013 6:11 UTC (Thu) by Mook (subscriber, #71173) [Link]

To echo the costs of enforcing names through search engines: Apparently jb of VLC spends three hours a week taking care of that for VLC. I assume it's probably more for him due to the high profile of the project, but still...

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 15:58 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (13 responses)

So where are these people now who espouse that the "right" way to do software distribution is to have users find an "easy to download and install package" on the project website?

"It's what users want"

"Linux will never succeed on the desktop until..."

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 16:38 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (12 responses)

"Linux will never succeed on the desktop until..."

You mean Linux have succeeded on desktop? News to me.

So where are these people now who espouse that the "right" way to do software distribution is to have users find an "easy to download and install package" on the project website?

It's still an important facet of the OS. But the question is less about the "random site" but more about "random developer". iOS succeeds despite the fact that officially you can install apps only from one repository, but the important fact is that apps in said repository are placed by the developers themselves, not by some packagers who may delay delivery for years (and will reject closed-source apps out of hand).

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 6:09 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

Instead you have Apple delaying apps for unpredictable periods and rejecting apps out of hand.

So the repository maintainers are paid by Apple instead of being volunteers or paid by a Linux company, that doesn't mean that there aren't problems sometimes.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 9:15 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

Perfection is impossible, but there are large difference between these two approaches. In Windows world and even in iOS world the right to present your creation to user is, well... developer's right. Sure, it's not unconditional right (in Windows world you need to convince people to download and install your creation and in iOS world there are a gatekeeper which is sometimes exceedingly picky), but it's still a right.

In Linux world it's treated as a privilege which can be conditionally given to you if you are lucky. And to earn this privilege you need to start with something absolutely unacceptable to most developers: you must publish source for your application (you can sometimes earn this privilege without publishing source - see nVidia drivers, for example, but these are rare exceptions, not rule).

You may rave about moral wrongness of closed-source software all you want (and you will even be correct), but fact of life remains: most desktop software is closed-source, Joe Average accepts it and as consequence demands it (Joe Average does not care about source availability at all but s/he does care about latest fashionable software creation which invariably happens to be closed-source - see Windows Phone RT woes: Windows Phone is much less picky then Linux distributions yet it still hurts from lack of fashionable software) thus without support from closed-source software developers you can not win battle for desktop.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 17:50 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

show me a quote _anywhere_ where I "rave about moral wrongness of closed-source software" That is not something I do, because it reflects a stance I do not believe in.

distro systems have their set of requirements (which boil down to "it must be freely redistributable as source, not too hard to build, and someone must volunteer to do the work"), plus the user/developer has the option of bypassing the distro

iOS has their set of requirements (which boil down to "it must not be deemed offensive in any way, and must not compete with Apple in any way"), and the user/developer has no option for bypassing Apple (except on the developers device)

Google has their set of requirements (which boil down to "it must not be fraudulent"), plus the user/developer has the option of bypassing Google (see the Amazon android app store for an example)

It's hard to see how Apple's stance is better than the others.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 22:22 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

plus the user/developer has the option of bypassing the distro

User yes, developer no. It's extremely hard to create binary package for Linux (the most you can usually hope for is few different packages for a few popular distributions... and even then there are no guarantee that said packages will be forward-compatible because libraries come and go in Linux distributions willy-nilly.

show me a quote _anywhere_ where I "rave about moral wrongness of closed-source software" That is not something I do, because it reflects a stance I do not believe in.

In the very next sentence, basically. Actions speak louder than words.

distro systems have their set of requirements (which boil down to "it must be freely redistributable as source, not too hard to build, and someone must volunteer to do the work")

Right. And since it's the only way to make your software easily available for the distribution user it basically means it's an ultimatum "create FOSS-software only, or else we'll punish you".

iOS has their set of requirements (which boil down to "it must not be deemed offensive in any way, and must not compete with Apple in any way"), and the user/developer has no option for bypassing Apple (except on the developers device)

Sure. It's a problem. But
1. The carrot is much, much bigger (there are hundreds of millions of iOS users compared to may be few millions for Linux).
2. Stick is also much smaller (you can be punished if you create some Apple-competing product, but most developers don't do that).

There are no pure black nor pure white in our world, it's all shades of gray and iOS is much, much, MUCH more developer-friendly shade.

It's hard to see how Apple's stance is better than the others.

Really? It's very easy to measure: how many developers find Apple's stance unacceptable vs how many developers find Linux distributions stance unacceptable. Sure, Apple are not saints, but they:
1. Provide stable platform for application development
and
2. Reject relatively few applications.
while Linux distributions:
1. Start with a demand which 90% of developers find totally unacceptable.
or
2. Offer "as-is platform" where "great deal of the day" can be summarized as "you can do whatever you want but we offer no promises and it's your responsibility to chase changes in our ABI".

Note that I'm not saying that Linux distributions must support commercial developers. They are mostly volunteer organizations and they can do whatever they want. But they can't simultaneously talk about "desktop for Joe Average" and ignore needs of developers who create software for said "Joe Average".

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 23:49 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

if you take this as me ranting about how closed source is unethical you are hopeless to talk to, goodby

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 9, 2013 22:32 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

that's what the Open Build Service is for (openbuildservice.org or in action (for free, yes, and supporting 7 architectures and 15+ distro's) on build.opensuse.org)

Otherwise, I disagree with you argument on other counts as well. It's not about gatekeeping, it is about money. The target group is too small on the Linux Desktop and yeah, we don't make it particularly easy to make $$$. But even when we do (on Ubuntu, for example) it doesn't happen to a great extend.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 9, 2013 23:42 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

that's what the Open Build Service is for (openbuildservice.org or in action (for free, yes, and supporting 7 architectures and 15+ distro's) on build.opensuse.org)

This is cool, but it does not solve the underlying problem: you still need to build bazillion packages to support tiny portion of [potential] users.

It's not about gatekeeping, it is about money.

Aren't they the same things? Most developers out there are commercial developers. They want to create and sell things. A lot of applications are created for a single buyer - and while it's not clear how well Linux does for these I don't think it's a big deal. But for desktop shrinkwrapped software matters, too. And this is where gatekeepers matter: they may raise investment needed to reach the audience (Linux distributions case) or they can reject your creation out of hand (Apple). When you hit this stage we are talking ROI - and ROI for Linux software is incredibly poor. Both because it's hard to distribute Linux software and because there are so few potential users.

But even when we do (on Ubuntu, for example) it doesn't happen to a great extend.

Why do you say so? Because there are no 500'000 applications? That's wrong measure to take.

Let's not talk about "big boys" (Windows, Android, etc). Let's take a look on small players. You know, webOS (less then 5 million users, 5000 applications), Chrome web store (30 millions users, about 6000 applications), Samsung's Bada (around 4 million users, around 2400 applications).

Ubuntu boasts 12 million users which means that we should expect about 3-5 thousand applications. And there are about 4000 of them, which sounds more-of-less fine. But these are Ubuntu apps, not Linux apps (all the links for RC Mini Racers will send you to the Ubuntu Software Center). Are we Ok with creation of Apple-style directory? If yes, then everything is fine: looks like Canonical knows what it does. If not, then well, we need to think about Linux's desktop future.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 9:12 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (4 responses)

It runs on _my_ desktop and mostly does what I want. So yes, it's a success.

Does it need to be a mass success to be a success ?

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 9:17 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

Linux was desktop OS from the day one (it was Linus's desktop). Yet somehow people don't perceive it as "success" thus I think yes, your (and mine, BTW: I'm writing this on Linux system) example does not count.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 9, 2013 22:44 UTC (Sat) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link] (2 responses)

Why do we accept the judgement over success (or not) from some unspecified "people"? I'm using Linux as sole desktop (1) since 0.9* (exact version is long forgotten) and judge Linux as a long-running success. I'm tired of reading about the question if the year of Linux-desktop comes, the first decade of Linux-desktop is already history. World domination may not come the next years, but this doesn't devaluate the successfull running Linux-desktop.

(1) several years ago I had booted for non-desktop use a specialized game-loader (aka Windows ;-))

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 9, 2013 23:56 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Why do we accept the judgement over success (or not) from some unspecified "people"?

Because we are humans. Look, you can assign arbitrary meanings to random words all you want but the more you do that the less understandable you become. If there are some widespread meaning assigned to words then it's much better to stop trying to explain that you are right and the whole world is wrong. Even if initially words had other meaning. Think hacker (which now means less of "a person who enjoys exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness" and more of "someone who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network"). Or addict - who's no longer "a debtor awarded as a slave to his creditor". And we no longer use girl in relation to males (yes, initially it meant a young person of either sex - dictionaries said so just a hundred years ago).

So the right question is not "why do we use terms as perceived by others" but "why would we use terms in some other way" - and I see no reason to do so.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 10, 2013 14:48 UTC (Sun) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

Precisely. And you confuse the words "domination" and "success".

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 19, 2013 10:47 UTC (Tue) by dudedude (guest, #89438) [Link]

On my linux system, I have an application DB.

When I install anything via it, it pulls an package from public access encrypted repository - package which is either checked and opensource or blindly trusted, but from original publisher;

PROBLEM SOLVED

The article talks about windows problems. Delete windows from your daughter laptop, install Linux. PROBLEM SOLVED.