Geronimo - trademark violation?

[Siva <si...@sella.it>]

I just ran geronimo using googlism.com and cudn't find anything which
relates to "jumping off a cliff".So that's
a good sign(ok ok i voted against the name)

But i found that a company called as "Apex Data Systems"
http://www.apexdatasystems.com/index.html
has a product called as Geronimo.Will it be a trademark violation if we use
the same name?Can some one throw more light?

Regards
Siva

Re: Geronimo - trademark violation?

[Geir Magnusson Jr <ge...@4quarters.com>]

On Dec 19, 2003, at 1:11 PM, Brian Behlendorf wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Siva wrote:
>> But i found that a company called as "Apex Data Systems"
>> http://www.apexdatasystems.com/index.html has a product called as
>> Geronimo. Will it be a trademark violation if we use the same name? 
>> Can
>> some one throw more light?
>
> Not really, it's in a different segment.  When the group of us first
> started using the term "Apache", there was already at least one video 
> game
> using "Apache" in its name, and one hardware vendor as well.  The
> trademark, whether registered or not, wouldn't be on "Apache" or
> "Geronimo" by itself anyways.  It would be on "Apache HTTP Server",
> "Apache Software Foundation", etc; so we really should be thinking of 
> the
> trademarkable entity here being something like "Apache Geronimo" or, 
> more
> defensibly, "Geronimo Application Server".  Note that "Geronimo J2EE
> Server" would not be something we could use, since J2EE is Sun's
> trademark.

We actually could use that, as we have a trademark license for J2EE now 
with the ASF as an <trumpet>Official Licensee</trumpet>.  However, I 
can't imagine anyone would want to add "J2EE" to the name, as I'm sure 
we'd spend a bit of time worrying about correct usage by people 
bundling the thing into distros.

geir

>
> 	Brian
>
>
-- 
Geir Magnusson Jr                                   203-247-1713(m)
geir@4quarters.com

Re: Geronimo - trademark violation?

[Brian Behlendorf <br...@collab.net>]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Siva wrote:
> But i found that a company called as "Apex Data Systems"
> http://www.apexdatasystems.com/index.html has a product called as
> Geronimo. Will it be a trademark violation if we use the same name? Can
> some one throw more light?

Not really, it's in a different segment.  When the group of us first
started using the term "Apache", there was already at least one video game
using "Apache" in its name, and one hardware vendor as well.  The
trademark, whether registered or not, wouldn't be on "Apache" or
"Geronimo" by itself anyways.  It would be on "Apache HTTP Server",
"Apache Software Foundation", etc; so we really should be thinking of the
trademarkable entity here being something like "Apache Geronimo" or, more
defensibly, "Geronimo Application Server".  Note that "Geronimo J2EE
Server" would not be something we could use, since J2EE is Sun's
trademark.

	Brian