Trademark usage and Branding Background

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Background for the OpenSolaris Trademark and Branding Guidelines

Underlying Sun's policy is the general law of trademarks. Trademarks exist to help consumers identify, and organizations publicize, the source of products. Some organizations make better products than others; over time, consumers begin to associate those organizations (and their trademarks) with quality. When such organizations permit others to place their trademarks on goods of lesser quality, they find that consumer trust evaporates quickly. That's the precise situation that Sun seeks to avoid -- especially since, when it comes to intangible products like software, trust is all consumers have to decide on.

Presumptions

This document is based on the following presumptions:

  1. Sun wishes to to create an ecosystem around OpenSolaris technology aimed at making it easy for developers to deploy applications that can be located, downloaded and used by any distribution that references the OpenSolaris brand,
  2. Sun wishes to build products (Distributions and Applications) that are part of the OpenSolaris ecosystem,and
  3. Sun wishes to enable others to build derivative operating systems that are compatible with the goals of the OpenSolaris operating system and, as an expression of that compatibility, are eligible to use the OpenSolaris brand in clearly defined ways.

At the heart of this OpenSolaris ecosystem vision are the following concepts:

  1. A minimalist "bootstrap core" exists that can be used as a building block for other distro builders. This core would contain just enough functionality to boot into a disk and network aware installer, interact with the user in whatever locale the user needs and follow a recipe to install the desired packages onto the system,
  2. A "installation recipe" that is used to pull in selected packages from either the network the install media.
  3. A set of network accessible OpenSolaris package repositories (and their mirrors) where the various OpenSolaris Community produced packages referenced in the recipe are to be found.

The OpenSolaris distribution is made up of this bootstrap core, a recipe of desired packages, and a cache of packages on its release media taken from one of the OpenSolaris repositaries. 

   Based on Sun’s experiment with early Java branding, in the later part of 
   the document, it looks as if we’ve articulated more levels than a brand 
   can successfully communicate...

Other distributions derived from the same bootstrap core differ from the "OpenSolaris Distribution" in the recipe of packages they choose to bundle and install; they all share the same levels of compatibility and access to the larger ecosystem of repositories and packages.

All distributions that reference the OpenSolaris brand are expected to be based on the above core+ecosystem conceptual architecture, as it is what provides for runtime compatibility and access to the extended OpenSolaris ecosystem.


The OpenSolaris Ecosystem.

Compatibility is at the core of the OpenSolaris brand. The intent is to create and sustain an ecosystem of compatible distributions, packages, applications and repositories that, together, can meet a wide range of user expectations while still providing a large market for application developers.

This ecosystem contains

  • Sun Microsystems
    • Trademark owner and final arbiter of all trademark-related "quality control"
  • The OpenSolaris Community
    • Community Groups that are responsible for building and packaging components
      • Projects that develop features that go into their community's component
    • User Groups
  • Package Repositories
    • Repositories contain the official packages built by the Communities and their Projects
    • Compatible Repositories contain packages with other attributes and sources
  • Applications can be Built for OpenSolaris
  • Operating System Distributions
    • OpenSolaris - the main distribution from the OpenSolaris Community constructed from the bootstrap core plus a set of packages found in the OpenSolaris Repositories
    • [Still being developed: OpenSolaris Remixes or OpenSolaris Compatible Distributions are compatible variations of the OpenSolaris Distribution.]

Because access to, and compatibility with this ecosystem is a key part of every distribution that uses the OpenSolaris Trademarks, application developers can presume that the ecosystem's repositories are available for getting new applications AND for satisfying their install-time dependencies.

At a high level goal, any distribution referencing the OpenSolaris brand is expected to be able to download, install and run any Built for OpenSolaris branded application found in any OpenSolaris or OpenSolaris Compatible branded Repository. 

 The above paragraph probably needs more work...

 ISSUE: What about core-OS level version skew?  If the
        application is compiled for OSv2, it won't run on OSv1...

 ISSUE: Do we need to define these things more explicitly?
        Is there a need for branding for repos and mirrors?


Who gets to decide what gets to be called OpenSolaris?

Sun, as trademark owner, gets to make this decision. How it does so is not specified by trademark law, except to require that there be some "quality control" of the brand-to-product-instance association. (If anyone could call their beverage "coke", the brand would have no value; if each cocacola bottling company could arbitrarily change the mixture it used to make the beverage, the brand would also have no value...)

In this situation, Sun is choosing to go down the path of taking selected outputs of the community, using them to construct a distro, and choosing to associate its brand with that instance. What and How things are chosen to become part of that (those?) distros is an evolving thing being driven by a complex interplay of factors. Looking to the future, there is no reason why this process can't/shouldn't evolve to be more and more community driven, to the point where Sun can simply adopt the community release(s) as the OpenSolaris branded distro(s).

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