RE: Naming of Cygwin/XFree86 components

["Robert Collins" <robert dot collins at itdomain dot com dot au>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harold Hunt [mailto:huntharo@msu.edu]
> Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2001 6:28 AM
> To: Cygx (E-mail)
> Subject: Naming of Cygwin/XFree86 components
> 
> 
> Recent new features and bug fixes have brought Cygwin/XFree86 
> to the point
> at which we are soon likely to receive massive amounts of 
> attention from
> contributors, users, and companies with X products for 
> Windows.  Attention
> from contributors and users will be great, but attention from 
> competing
> companies could be undesirable.
> 
> I am concerned that the name of our executable, 'XWin.exe', 
> the name of our
> library, 'libXwin.a', and the name of our primary cvs 
> directory, 'hw/xwin/',
> will attract such undesirable attention that we wish to 
> avoid.  I can't
> predict whom we might attract attention from, but I can say 
> that StarNet
> Communications Corp., http://www.starnet.com/, sells a 
> product similar to
> Cygwin/XFree86 named X-Win32, http://www.starnet.com/products/.
> 
> I do not know if anyone owns a trademark on the name XWin, but I would
> certainly agree that the name XWin could too easily be confused with a
> competing product named X-Win32.

Not really an issue IMO. Xwin is the standard name of the binary for an
X-Server. 
"Xfree86" is the name of the product. And there is no confusion on that
:].
 
> To avoid potential legal squabbles, which I am not willing to 
> subject myself
> to, I am suggesting that we change the names of the aforementioned
> Cygwin/XFree86 components before we attract any undesirable attention.

This would be a bad move. anything linked to -lXwin would break. That's
what standards are for. (ie libc/libm).

Rob
 
> I hereby declare the topic of renaming open for discussion :)
> 
> Please keep suggested new names to yourself, to avoid a 
> flamefest, until we,
> as a project, have decided whether we will rename any 
> components at all.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any input and/or comments,
> 
> Harold
> 
>