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Apple sued by Open Group, files countersuit

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Refalm:
Damnit, why does my country get different Heineken advertisements than the rest of the world...

Oh wait  :D

Laukev7:
They are not misusing the word "open", Calum. They just happened to use that name before the free / open source movement started. and the name stayed. The word "open", back then meant that they were a coalition that shared common standards to stay compatible with each other. This had nothing to do with open software, and they make it clear on their website.

Redde Caesari quae sunt Caesari, et quae sunt Dei Deo, and all that.

I agree, though, that the term "UNIX" has become too commonplace to stay proprietary. The whole context has changed, and many systems other than the "official" ones are compatible and very similar in structure, and even the original source has had major modifications over the years. Besides, few people ever associate UNIX with the Open Group, and use it as a generic term.

solo:
I hope Apple wins. UNIX is used by the general populace more as a general term used to identify operating systems that have a feature set comparable to UNIX.

One nice thing though is that if they don't win, it won't kill anyone, just a measely $110,000. I'll just be sad  :( .

Calum:
hmm, well they seem to have formed to promote open standards as you say, and under their original guise of X/Open Company Ltd were formed in 1984. Interestingly the Free Software Foundation was also set up in 1984, and Richard Stallman had been working on his open source *IX software, and his emacs rewrite for Unix for a good few years before that. Of course Stallman has never endorsed the use of the word "open", preferring "free" (both of which are ambiguous and do not mean what they are intended to mean).

From this i still opine that the open group have got a cheek doing anything that stifles open standards in computing , and that in fact Stallman's free software concept certainly does predate the Open Group's vision of open standards.

As it happens, while i morally am on the side of apple in this case, i think that legally they are actually in the wrong. Unix is a registered trademark and cannot be said to be generic. If somebody else started selling "macintoshes" because the name was now generic i think apple would have something to say, quite possibly in court.

Laukev7:
Personally, I think the whole UNIX thing is a source of confusion. But since the UNIX trademark belongs to the Open Group, it should be their choice whether to make UNIX generic or not. And if it turns out that Apple loses the lawsuit, they can still say that their system is based on BSD, which is close enough for most people (if they even heard about UNIX in the first place).

As for which comes before which, well, what's really important to consider is the reasons why the Open Group chose that name.

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