[Mageia-discuss] Are you aware that mageia.com is already registered...

Michael Scherer misc at zarb.org
Fri Oct 8 13:22:12 CEST 2010


Le vendredi 08 octobre 2010 à 11:50 +0200, Stéphane Téletchéa a écrit :
> Just to ensure we will not encompass the mandrake story again, check
> http://www.mageia.com ... 

We had a quite long and complex research to find a name : 
https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-discuss/20100920/000315.html

Then we indeed stumbled on the fact that the .com was used but this was
not seen as a problem since there is a lot of precedent in free
software :

apache.com is not affiliated with apache.org 
  (.com registered before .org )

ubuntu.com is not affiliated with ubuntu.org 
  (.org registered 2 years before .com )

gnome.com is not affiliated with gnome.org
  (.com 2 years before .org )

python.com is not affiliated with python.org 
  (.com 1 year before .org)

I just took the biggest projects I could think, but afaik, none of them
had a problem based on dns alone. To have a problem like Mandrakesoft or
Mobilix had, the problem need to be taken from a trademark point of
view. And if you look on the list I gave, this was checked ( now, we
forgot to check association name, but we worked around it quite
easily ).

People asked the question in the past :
https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia-discuss/20100921/000567.html

So yes, we are aware. It is like computer security, just a question of
evaluating the risk. And I think we are not doing much harm to them
( and that we do not want ), neither the do to us. This is basically a
brick and mortar shop. The trademark law is quite clear, you have to
explicitly tell the domain of your mark, and so does the DNS system
( ie, you have to use a tld ).

And you are you aware you are sending html mail on this list :) ?
-- 
Michael Scherer



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