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Subject: Re: Never ever use word BitKeeper if Larry does not like you
From: "Stephen C. Tweedie" <sct@redhat.com>
To: John Jasen <jjasen@realityfailure.org>
Cc: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>, Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
       Lars Marowsky-Bree <lmb@suse.de>, Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       vojtech@suse.cz, Stephen Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>
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Hi,

On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 16:21, John Jasen wrote:

> > > Let's try a little simple substitution since you seem to be needing coffee
> > > this morning:
> > > 
> > >     "Red Cap: a proprietary Red Hat clone"
> > >     "The goal of this system is to produce a system compatible with Red Hat"
> 
> Check with your lawyers again, since Red Hat has posted in the past that 
> 'similar' namings would be chased after. I think the example they used was 
> 'Pink Fedora'.

Having a product name "confusingly similar" to another one _is_ grounds
for trademark action.  See Lindows, Mobilix etc.  (And yes, of course,
it's a very subjective thing in many cases.)

But simply comparing one product to another is not the same.

I'd expect using a name like "BitBucket" to be much more at risk of
being a trademark infringement than merely claiming that a project "aims
to be BitKeeper compatible" or "can read BitKeeper repositories."

Cheers,
 Stephen

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