Hey Folks,
Was trolling around on the internet and looked up the BeOS trademark. It was due for renewal this year and it looks like ACCESS allowed it to lapse.
Anyone else find that interesting? Any interest from the community to buy the name and bring it back?
No need to buy the name, if the trademark is expired; surely that’s what the trademark being expired means?!
In which case, let me be the first to announce BeOS: a new distribution of the Haiku operating system!
(Though I’m pretty sure not just the name but also the distinctive red and blue logo have been available for years; if I remember correctly, a mark that’s been out of use for 7 years is up for grabs? Not A Lawyer, mind.)
Not a lawyer either but ACCESS renewed rhe wordmark in 2016 but didn’t this year. Renewals are 10 years.
if Haiku, Inc can register the trademark again, the OS could theoretically convert to BeOS without a legal challenge. Although that’s the US trademark which might have to be established in other regions/countries.
Having the trademark would be nice if it doesn’t cost too much,but do we really want to rename Haiku to BeOS as you suggest?
I don’t think that’s a great idea,with Haiku now being 25 years old and rather well-known in the open-source community,while BeOS has been dead for more than 25 years.
Owning the trademark would give some more safety to projects that have a “Be” name and maybe even the Be red/blue colors,and protect against somebody else getting the trademark who could enforce it more strictly.
But using it for the Haiku project directly doesn’t make much sense nowadays in my opinion.
I’ve been tracking the deadline since August; I’ve discussed it with others, and we would like to proceed with registering the trademark for strategic reasons—it would allow us to retain the name in the future as well. Let’s take a poll to see how many of us there are and try to figure out how much it would cost. I am, of course, willing to sound out others in my country to see if they would like to contribute; in Germany, it is already being used in another sector.
In Europe, the BeOS trademark was awarded to Luca Colombo for hardware and software.
I would love to see BeOS be picked up by the project. I can imagine that both Haiku and BeOS could be used strategically. Something akin to Fedora and Redhat.
Unless you actually use it in that sector I don’t see how you can defend a trademark. Also what would be the point of having it?
I understand the arguments for securing the TM, but I personally care only for the name '“Haiku”.
This is precisely why Access could not renew the trademark: they never actually used it. In the meantime, however, the group had to find a name other than OpenBeOS to shield itself from claims made by the party that had secured the rights to the BeOS trademark. So, regarding the need to distinguish between what constitutes a “fact” and what doesn’t—and acknowledging that having possession of the trademark earlier would have been useful—we have to face the reality of the situation. As for the significance of the Haiku brand: however unpleasant it may be to admit—and especially to write this to those who worked hard to build its value—we must acknowledge that if Haiku has to remind the world of its noble BeOS lineage every time it makes an announcement, I fear it amounts to admitting that we are once again dealing with a “fact”. The Be trademark could have been acquired long ago, but under today’s rules, it is considered a weak mark, and the registration application might even be rejected, particularly in English-speaking countries. Finally, in all honesty, whenever I see that Deskbar button featuring a blue falling leaf, I am convinced we come across as communication amateurs; the sight of it still makes me cringe.
We can consider the matter closed—with the same honesty shown so far. To someone who can weigh the second half of the 90s against the present day—especially having lived through it—changing the name will soon become a necessity. This isn’t because the current name don’t honors the past, but because it has become synonymous with “beta” and all that entails; to the outside world, a 25-year-long beta phase can look like nothing but a failure.
I’ve never been a fan of the “Haiku” name since the switch from OpenBeOS. I remember when there was the joke that was played with the name “Walter” many years back and the community falling in love with it before it was made known that it was indeed a joke. I think that blew up in the faces of the jokesters hehe. Anyways, these days I just see Haiku as BeOS going by a different name and I sometimes refer to Haiku as BeOS when discussing it depending on the audience.
I see the need for the Haiku project to have the BeOS trademark in much the same way as people wanting Access Co. to release the BeOS source code under an open source license, it has limited value in today’s world due to the time that has passed. Haiku as a brand and what it has achieved as an OS has much more value than BeOS has now. Of course we can thank Be and BeOS for the design philosophy and API’s etc. that Haiku is built upon, but the project now proudly stands on it’s own merits without the need to use the BeOS trademark for relevance.
I’d much rather Haiku Inc. use it’s limited funds to keep the project going in the ways it does now than register another trademark which can be costly in IP attorney and filing fees for little practicable benefit to the project.
Let me know the day you see Microsoft citing DOS or BASIC to promote Windows. I used to praise BeOS 30 years ago, but today I view Haiku as a nostalgia project with no real-world use cases. Can you name a single thing it does better than other operating systems? Back then, I could record video onto IDE drives; today, I can’t use it. I think the problem is that facts stay grounded while dreams remain up in the clouds. I use GNU/Linux and sometimes macOS these days, which means that whenever I install Haiku on a computer, it doesn’t stay there. Still, I’m an optimist—maybe in another 10 years, I’ll have Haiku on my tombstone.
Perhaps I was a fanatic when I was young, and today I am more demanding—and rightly so, I don’t want to make a fool of myself. When a former user writes something like that to you, your brand is worth less than toilet paper. Welcome back to the real world, I seek the mark of the past because the present no longer excites me.
I missed that. Can you link to a few announcements citing its BeOS lineage?
Acquiring the BeOS trademark would have been nice 20 years ago. Since then Haiku has improved upon BeOS in every way. Few people remember BeOS. Why amplify the misunderstanding that we’re re-implementing a 30 year old operating system?
BeOS has failed, while Haiku succeeded IMO. This is of course because we are an open source community project; if we tried to be commercial we’d have to give up a long time ago, I’m sure.
No matter what ends up happening, this is a fascinating debate.
The point of having it is so that somebody else doesn’t take it and fork with the name BeOS.
If someone picked up the BeOS trademark, would they have the ability to impose it on the Haiku community? I understand Haiku has/had an agreement with Access for certain BeOS usage, books and a few other uses. Will anything of that be affected?
No,the OpenBeOS project rebranded to Haiku exactly for the reason to avoid any conflicts with the BeOS trademark.
Access later released the source code for some components of BeOS (such as the Tracker file manager) and allows the redistribution of the BeBook,but that’s unrelated to the BeOS trademark (the name BeOS and the logo).
The kernel installation reverse mechanism.
The elegant way to install software.
The GUI API.
The simple installation of the OS.
The boot process shown with symbols.
The fast booting.