Re: Personal status update

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 05:42:40PM -0400, Harold Hunt wrote:
>>Fine.  Thanks for your help.  But an issue which Chris needs to answer
>>and he raised that issue to me in a private communication, "Should not
>>RedHat project be using Cygwin name because it is Red Hat trademark?"
>>Check with him if you intend to maintain an outside sever for
>>codumentation and name it Cygwin/XFree86 Documents something....
>
>You've got to be straight-up lying now, I just seached the USPTO.
>There is not a trademark on "Cygwin".

Harold,
I believe that Suhaib is referring to some private email we have been
exchanging on a completely unrelated topic.

Cygwin is an unregistered trademark.  That's still acceptable as long as
no one challenges it.  If they do then we just have to show prior use and
THEN we register it.

For the record, I don't have any problems with people attaching the name
Cygwin to stuff as long as it is clear that it isn't somehow a
sanctioned Red Hat product.  Cygwin/XFree86 exists on sources.redhat.com
but it isn't a Red Hat product.  It doesn't claim to be the "official"
port although I guess it could be considered such since I believe that I
suggested to Suhaib that he could head this project.

So, you can use "Bob's Cygwin Midnight Commander" project if you want
and I wouldn't have a problem with it.  If you called it "The Cygwin
Midnight Commander" project then I probably would.

Whether I have a legal leg to stand on as far as this opinion is
concerned, I don't know...  This is based on my understanding of stuff
from back when I ran my own company.  I'm sure that my understanding
has atrophied in various interesting ways since then.

If this all plays out, I'll probably have to start asking people to
attach little tm's to things with the word Cygwin in them.  Blech.

Again, this has nothing to do with anything that has gone on in this
mailing list.  If you do plan on forking, I will be very sad but I won't
vindictively insist that you do not attach the name Cygwin to your
project.

So, please don't call Suhaib a liar.  He's an upright guy, just like
you.

I wish we could all just get along...

cgf