Fabrizio Balliano

You want to start a commercial website, you want to spread the the Ubuntu word and you’re already involved in some Ubuntu related free initiatives (let’s say you’re also an Ubuntu affiliate).

You’ve to decide the name of your business (and the website domain too) and we all know how much relevance this task has in the future success of the business itself.

You and your marketing team decide that “hey-you-have-ubuntu-we-can-do-things-for-you.com” (it’s just an example :P) it’s the right one, but… hey Ubuntu is a trademark, we can’t use that name!

So what? Let’s take a look at the Ubuntu trademark policy, it’s a long text but we’ve to read it all but we note:

it is very unlikely that we will approve Trademark use in the following cases:
- Use of a Trademark in a company name
- Use of a Trademark in a domain name which has a commercial intent

But you think “Hey I’m not going to steal Ubuntu identity or capitalize on Ubuntu name, I’m just building an Ubuntu based service” so any marketer would never suggest you a different name (for your website, you can change the company name, that’s not the problem) because it’s too effective and any alternative won’t work.

So you write to the Ubuntu trademarks team asking if you can use the name, Ubuntu knows you’re in good faith cause they know your free projects and Ubuntu advocancy but… I still haven’t got back a complete answer to my mail thus… updates will come (I hope soon!).

OK I know that the title of the post has “free software” but a commercial service promoting a free project (support or anything else) it’s always a good thing for the project, or am I wrong? Thus my question is “trademarks and free software can live together?” It could be good to protect a fraud service using the protected name but it also is a limitation for an enterprise level growth of services.

PS: Remember that Ubuntu and Canonical are registered trademarks of Canonical Ltd.

Talking about web we have many open standards, actually we also have an open standard for documents (opendocument). Till now animations were only done by Macromedia Flash, now is going out Microsoft Silverlight, both with obviously different “protocols”.

We (Linux users) had some difficulties with flash player in the past, some guys are working on free/open flash players, what will happen with this new technology?

Could we think about creating an open standard for web animation format? Should Macromedia/Adobe open his specs?

Every news website today is flooded by the “HD-DVD key found” news, but what’s the meaning of all this confusion? I see two different episodes:

• censorship: some of those sites censored the news that publishes the key
• revolt: after the news were deleted, those sites were flooded, a real attack against that kind of control, seen as an abuse

Why those news have been censored? Fear of the majors or what?

It’s been told to us that it’s illegal to crack media protections to copy cds/dvds but it seems now that people are claming again their freedom to use what they bought. Can people make a law, seen as wrong, change?

Some of the majors are partly abandoning DRM, but if it’s absolutely clear that people don’t want that kind of armor-plate, how long will this fight last? Are the majors gainin’ hate from fighiting the final user (and buyer)?

Too many questions and no answers… from my personal point of view I hate go to the cinema and beeing forced to see 1 minute anti-piracy spot, maybe someone should remember I paid the ticket to watch the movie?