Apple Sued Over Unix Trademark 881
Jerrry writes "CNET News reports The Open Group is suing Apple over unlicensed use of the Unix trademark, after Apple used the term in conjunction with its Mac OS X marketing. Apple, meanwhile, is countersuing to have the Unix trademark declared invalid because the term has become generic."
Apple should pay up. (Score:4, Interesting)
After all, Apple has trademarks of their own, how would they like it if MS or some other company started using them without a license?
Wow, Kettle meet Pot, Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, Apple is getting a little taste of it's own medicine. Didn't they sue somone over them copying, or making a similar color scheme on a pc case?
And haven't they sued before for things just a frivilous. Apple is fanatic about protecting their ip.
But maybe they are wrong here.
Puto
Did the check bounce? (Score:5, Interesting)
What am I missing here?
You just have to laugh (Score:5, Interesting)
SCO suing IBM
Open Group suing Apple
Apple suing Open Group
It's starting to sound like a game of "Six Degrees".
It's about time (Score:5, Interesting)
Unix looks generic to me (Score:5, Interesting)
If most people look on it that way, the trademark is probably generic.
Re:Go, go, Apple, go! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Go Apple! (Score:1, Interesting)
Go Apple, even though I prefer to build my own pcs and run Debian. (I know I'm rambling. I'm at work bored till 9, inflating my income
Re:In other News... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unix is generic (Score:4, Interesting)
e a generic term. Removing trademark status would benefit not only Apple, but the free Unixes, Linux and the BSDs.
When was the last time that some company came out with Unix v9.0 or whatever?
Making a stand (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, no company is required to pay more than $110,000, said Graham Bird, vice president of marketing for The Open Group.
You know the legal battle will cost much, much more than that...but instead of doing what makes economic sense, they're doing what's right, and taking the burden off the rest of us. Because you know that if the Open Group succeeds, they're probably going to start suing red-hat and other linux distros for explaining that linux is "unix based" in their FAQ.
Re:In other News... (Score:3, Interesting)
They might be able to tag them for failing to put the little circle r on it, but thats about it.
Except for groups like scientology that use it to harass, not too many other groups/corps/people sue over simple use unless you are claiming your product is their product.
BWP
Re:MAC OSX is unix (Score:2, Interesting)
I, personally, have a hard time not considering anything that uses either System V or BSD to be Unix. These have been the pillars of this OS, and when not used have been the models for other operating systems. I would not consider POSIX to be a good way to judge a system as being Unix because Windows NT 4.0 was POSIX compliant and it is not Unix.
I'm pretty sure Windows uses a good chunk of BSD code as well. UNIX, it ain't, though.
Isn't OS X BSD-Based? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since Darwin is really a BSD-offshoot, shouldn't it have the same rights?
strangely amusing (Score:3, Interesting)
find the marketing genius that came up with this.
Apple used the term in conjunction with its Mac OS X marketing
have the Unix trademark declared invalid because the term has become generic
At least it seems that apple has now realized its product is generic and is using terms to describe it that way. So much for brand recognition. I find it amusing that the suit and tie crowd in advertising is getting PAID to declare their product generic.
Re:Go, go, Apple, go! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think there might be a little more to it than that. Just got done reading ESR's OSI Position on the SCO-vs-IBM suit [opensource.org] paper, and it looks like the right to use the Unix trademark is conferred upon vendors who go through a certification process to confirm compliance to Unix standards.
So it's sort of like if somebody slaps the famous "compact disc" logo on a copy-protected disc - you're advertising conformance to a standard that you don't conform to. That's not to say that apple is necessarily out of compliance with the standard, the point is that the "Unix" trademark is the TOG's "seal of approval".
Re:Goal is to Maintain the Unix Standard (Score:5, Interesting)
If apple wins (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Generic? Based on what? (Score:5, Interesting)
When someone says Unix to me, in my mind, I do not think "Officially Licensed Solaris UNIX", I think, "oh, what flavor?" Is it Coca-Unix, or Pepsi Unix? FreeBSD Unix, or Linux Unix*?
(Demonstrating, of course, that Coke > Pepsi)
Re:Go, go, Apple, go! (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the idea of making UNIX generic because we can now market Linux and FreeBSD as UNIX, giving it instant credibility and attraction in the market.
I dislike the idea of making UNIX generic because we can now market Windows as UNIX, giving it instant credibility and attraction in the market.
Re:Unix name and Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, I believe that Apple has a legitimate claim to the Unix name, and that, contrary to what you say, OS X probably qualifies as a UNIX; at least as much as, say, Solaris does. Furthermore, I think that the case you bring up concerning Microsoft is probably trivial. Microsoft would open itself up to lawsuits based on false advertising, or false representation of goods or services.
I think legally the "UNIX" label carries with it a set of generic expectations on behalf of the general public, and nothing more. The public would clearly feel misled if Microsoft started marketing Windows as "Unix," as you suggest -- it clearly does not meet the generally accepted definition of what a "Unix" is. Apple's OS X, on the other hand, from any reasonably technical standpoint, clearly meets that definition. This definition is left intentionally vauge by this post, as I firmly believe the defition of a "unix" is vauge indeed.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, to be a Unix, you have to (a) implement the Single Unix Specification [opengroup.com], and (b) to pay license fees to the Open Group. Neither Apple nor the FreeNixes pay license fees to the Open Group, pay for Single Unix conformance testing, or fully implement it (due to some parts being inconsistent or plain stupid), so they are not Unix. It's that simple. And, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't matter at all.
Re:Apple should pay up. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, what they did was license the name "FireWire" for free. They did not release the FireWire trademark into the public domain. Big difference.
Re:Apple should pay up. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Did the check bounce? (Score:5, Interesting)
From The Open Group's own website:
Here's also an osOpinion piece [osopinion.com] from May '01 questioning MacOS X's certification as Unix and at the bottom is an update noting:
Re:iInconsistent iLawyers (Score:3, Interesting)
I would think that sooner or later somebody at Apple will remember that they, too, have one and quite possibly two Unix licenses of their own, and the case'll be thrown out.
Re:Go, go, Apple, go! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Did the check bounce? (Score:2, Interesting)
All of these statements are true. Mac OS X is based on BSD, which is UNIX in every sense of the world.
TOG's case is basically that Apple's marketing is confusing and that people might get the wrong impression that Mac OS X actually is UNIX, as opposed to just UNIX-based. They're right about that, but the fault lies not with Apple, but rather with the funny dual nature of the word UNIX. It's a trademark in narrow application, but it also has a broader application that is not trademarked. So TOG should lose and Apple should win.
Re:In other News... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Did the check bounce? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you sure that doesn't refer to A/UX?
If I'm not mistaken it is Unix(tm).
This lawsuit (maybe?) sponsored by Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
The timing of this is highly suspect. Apple is less than two weeks from unveiling Mac OS X 10.3, and signs are that they'll be announcing new 64-bit Power Macs based on the 970. Couple that with the fact that Quark has finally gotten their shit together and all those designers will be able to upgrade computer and OS, the Mac platform is poised to become a juggernaut.
Wouldn't surprise me a bit if some money to bankroll this lawsuit was coming, although circuitously, from our good friends at Microsoft-- scared because Longhorn is still a few horizons away and there's nothing good in the pipeline before it, and looking around desperately for something to obstruct/embarass Apple's progress.
Certification and other things (Score:4, Interesting)
While thinking about it, I would guess that Apple wants to be to able to use freely the Unix in its marketing, yet also have the freedom to build a system that is based currently on the Unix 'approach' and then branch as they feel necessary. Having to conform to Unix certification would probably prevent the system from evolving as it needs to.
What is going to be interesting is between this and the SCO vs IBM issue, Unix may just as well be in the public domain. There is so much of the basic workings that is public knowledge and has found itself into numerous computer science text books, I wonder whether anybody can lay a claim to Unix, either as intellectual property or as a trademark.
Re:UNIX: What's the first thing that comes to mind (Score:4, Interesting)
I've known about UNIX for about 10 years now. I've been using it in some form for about that long. (NetBSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, etc.) I know of The Open Group, I've heard/read a few mentions of them before, in relation to the UNIX trademark, but I haven't a damn clue what they do or why they own that trademark.
Do they make a version of UNIX? Shit, I don't know.
Do they market UNIX? Again, dunno. I never see any "UNIX: Brought to you by The Open Group" posters, or ads or anything of the sort. To me, they don't have any public presence.
Does this make me ignorant? Maybe. I've gotten along just fine being ignorant of this group.
What does that say about their trademark? I bet if you took a poll of the slashdot community (and since slashdot has that capability, why not?) most of them would probably not know which OS is REAL UNIX, or who The Open Group is, or what they do. Furthermore, I'd guess that most of them think about UNIX the same way I do: FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, AIX, whatever; it's all just UNIX, they basically all do the same thing. To me that's the equivalent of everyone calling bandages Band-Aids, or tissues Kleenex, etc., etc. I am not everyone else though, so perhaps I'm wrong.
Has apple misused the UNIX trademark? Perhaps. I do recall seeing some Apple ads touting that it is UNIX based, though I do not recall any stating outright that it is indeed UNIX (R). Does this mean that Apple is misusing The Open Group's trademark? Could be. But that's now up to our legal system to decide evidently, and given the actions of our legal system over the past 3 years or so, I'd say there's probably not a great outcome to this.
Re:Go, go, Apple, go! (Score:3, Interesting)
Why does apple license some things and not others? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does apple license some ridiculous "technologies and patents" like 1-click shopping from Amazon and then at the same time not bother to plunk down the small amount (i'm sure it is for a company the size of apple) of change to officially get their OS UNIX certified?
I mean, it should meet the open group's standards, right? My concern is apple might not think it will meet TOG's standards and they'd rather not risk it. (eitherwise, they'd just pay for it like they did with 1-click)
Apple's certification A/UX, not OS X, I think (Score:3, Interesting)
A number of posts have mentioned that Apple is certified by the Open Group. I would think that the certification is for A/UX, not OS X.
It ran a patched version of the regular (system 7) Mac OS as a normal Unix process - so all of your classic Mac applications all ran together in one process, in one memory space, much like the regular classic Mac OS. But then you could have command-line Unix processes too. There was also Mac X, a rather nice X server, so you could run Unix X11 applications on A/UX as Unix processes, and display them in Mac X, which was a Mac OS application.
I beta tested A/UX 2.0 when I was a QA engineer at Apple in 1989 and 1990. I was testing the regular version of MacTCP, but was helping out the A/UX QA people who were testing the A/UX version of MacTCP that was really a shim over Berkeley sockets.
I believe A/UX 1.0 didn't have a Mac OS GUI at all. I think you could run a native X server on it.
Interestingly, they didn't use to have an installer of any sort. The way you obtained A/UX was to purchase it preinstalled on a SCSI hard drive. At work at Apple, we would duplicate installations by using dd to copy the whole hard drive to another drive.
I never had the sense that Apple as a whole ever took A/UX very seriously. For example, I was frustrated that A/UX wasn't really that great as a Unix platform, while not considering using it to run Mac OS.
It annoyed me no end that virtual memory page 0 in the Mac OS process wasn't unmapped - you could read and write nil pointers without error. That was done so buggy Mac applications wouldn't crash, but I felt that having an unmapped page 0 was the whole point to running a protected-mode OS on the Mac, to aid software development.
I also wanted Unix command-line tools for developing Mac OS applications. I thought it very silly to use the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop to develop Mac OS software on A/UX - it was a command-line tool in a GUI environment. I wanted to use Emacs and Unix make. I asked about this at the Apple WorldWide Developer's Conference one year and they looked at me like I had nine heads.
I think the reason Apple developed A/UX at all was to satisfy government procurement requirements that required POSIX certification - that's the same reason Windows NT has a POSIX box, not because Microsoft ever expected anyone to actually use it.
My understanding is that these days a Unix certification requires a whole bunch of things that neither Mac OS X nor any Open Source clone of Unix could satisfy - for example, Motif, and not just an open source clone like Lesstif.
Finally, the I/O architecture of Mac OS X doesn't bear much resemblance to Unix. For example, while there are special files in /dev, the files are created dynamically when hardware is discovered and deleted when the hardware is unloaded. You have to discover the filenames using a procedure based on Microsoft COM, as described in Apple's document
Accessing Hardware from Applications [apple.com].
That alone makes OS X source code-incompatible with many Unix programs. It's not too hard to port, but the whole point of certification is that porting should be trivial.
Some history .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple added to this a MacOS layer (all of the MacOS ran in a single A/UX process) - I was really impressed with the nifty job they did - if you look at the later A/UX releases when you walk up to a screen you have to look hard to figure out it's not a native MacOS box.
It only ran on 68k Macs, they let it die when they went to PPC - I still have a copy that boots, rumor is that there's an AUX DNS server still running somewhere in Europe. And of course I go to the A/UX user's group dinner at MacWorld every Jan.
At least Apple is defending itself (Score:3, Interesting)
The Open Group and Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
"The Open Group, created this year to act as the holding company for The Open Software Foundation (OSF) and X/Open Company Ltd., provides a worldwide forum for collaborative development and other open systems activities.
The Active Group, to be formed under the auspices of The Open Group, will manage the evolution of ActiveX technologies. It will take advantage of The Open Group services in the areas of development, branding, testing and licensing. The Active Group also will provide a forum for discussion and input on the direction of ActiveX."
Microsoft will provide specifications, source code, reference implementations and validation tests for ActiveX technologies to The Open Group.
They claim to support "standards", but their standards are not W3C type stadards. The Open Group's standards [opengroup.org] involves "Boundaryless Information Flow":
Any full solution to the Boundaryless Information Flow problem needs to have a chain of technology components, preferably based on open standards, that: - Integrate data - Securely deliver data - Register data - Enable the flow of data - Develop systems that enable this flow of data - Manage systems that deliver this flow of data - Adhere to policies that govern the flow of data
They want to standardize open source to the point of defining process and architecture. Sounds to me like a ploy to curb/control the innovation that is charteristic of the open source community and at the same time distract attention from standards like W3C. Interopablity has nothing to do with the flow, but rather the format of data (apple).
This lawsuit and their copyright is nothing but mickey mouse BS - much like SCO. Is Microsoft be behind both? If they are not - they should be - because the likes of Unix and Apple could sink their boat pretty quickly once they slap palladium in their product.
Re:Go, go, Apple, go! (Score:3, Interesting)
Even GNU's got that N in the middle of it's acronym to keep it from being Unix. Sure, the Hurd of interfaces representing depth in GNU is even further from Unix-think than Mac OS X but that doesn't mean that Apple saying "Built on the industrial-strenth foundation of Unix" isn't misleading.
Darwin is interesting but it doesn't have the multiple decades of testing that Unix has, and unlike Linux (the kernel) I've gotten a kernel panic just using a web browser. (I've had Linux crash on me when I've been doing stupid things with hardware. Mac OS X a lot easier.)
(Again, I'm not dissing Darwin, I'm just asking "What is Unix?" especially in the light of how Apple is marketing it's OS to unixheads.)
Should have enforced that mark, X/Open! (Score:5, Interesting)
A longstanding failure to vigorously ensure that those third-party products only cover licensed Unices or otherwise make clear that unlicensed products are not Unix makes the Open Group's case a tough one to win. Just like asprin, kerosene and the thermos, Unix has arguably long been a generic term for a specific class of operating systems.
To put it another way, when you hear that an OS is Unix, do you immediately think, "Ah-hah, it's passed the UNIX 93, 95, 98 or Base conformance criteria administered by the Open Group! I can now use the T_TCO_TRANSFAILPROB QoS flag without fear!"
In any case, nothing can be more ironic than the X/Open version of the famous license plate [unix.org]: "Live Free Or Die: UNIX. (UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.)"
Re:"GNU/Unix" has a nice ring to it (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if it's been kept quiet cuz everyone knows it's a bunch of crap and hence Open Group doesn't want that publicity. It's been 18 months and still nowhere near trial, and it seems like many here are just now hearing about it.
What next? /. sued for having Unix as topic of discussion without licensing code and obtaining the proper permissions in triplicate? Sheeesssh!
Real Q: Is Apple using UNIX as a trademark? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Generic Term doesn't mean "NO RULES" for fraud! (Score:3, Interesting)
Dennis Ritchies "other UNIX" page for a collection of commercial "UNIX" items that aren't operating systems (hence the use of the mark is allowable).
All Microsoft has to do is claim that their "Windows Unix" certainly has common 'nix features (hierarchical file system, multi-tasking, some degree of POSIX compliance) to beat a deceptive advertising rap. (Hell, nobody has come after them for false advertising for claiming their software does a lot of things that it really sucks at, why should calling it a unix be any different?)