RE: Naming of Cygwin/XFree86 components

[Suhaib Siddiqi <ssiddiqi at inspirepharm dot com>]

 I agree with Chris, keep using XWIN and do not worry about trademark.
Startnet does not own it.  Thier product is X-Win32, which is different,
there is X-WinPro and XWIN is an abrivation of XWIN.  I did a brief search
long time ago before naming executable xwin.  I am not an attorney but I
think using name XWIN is safe, as Chris mentioned.

Suhaib

-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Faylor
To: Cygx (E-mail)
Sent: 4/28/2001 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: Naming of Cygwin/XFree86 components

On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 04:28:27PM -0400, Harold Hunt wrote:
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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.

I just did a trademark search for "Xwin" and found only one in an
unrelated
industry (rock crushers).

I suspect that the name "X-Windows" is somehow locked up by the X
Contortium
and that it should be safe to call the package *xwin*.

cgf