The Gentoo XD2 port project

Spider · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 1:33 am Post subject: Good luck

interesting project, I was hacking some on it in their 1.4 desktop days, and so far the most "complete" solution is to provide a complete tree with an selectively un-propagated gnome-* tree, where you simply replace the packages they have patched and leave the rest.

some points first though.

a) Copyright and trademark.
You must manually go through -all- of their packages and remove the ximian logo, the monkey and all "ximian (tm) " texts that appear on the desktop. You will also have to create replacement art for theese items.

b) Source.
Theres no sourcecode as of yet, its yet to be released (next week, afaik)

c) compability and bugs
.... dont give us headaches ;)

I think the "simplest" way is to setup a second rsync repro with some selective delete magic applied that removes the gnome packages that are replaced with the xd2 packages....

...that is not to say I recommend that way, suggest it, or support it.
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erik_swanson · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 2:01 am Post subject:

Spider:

Thank you very much for bringing up the point on Ximian's trademark.

One thing which I have not seen much documentation on and would appreciate any pointers on is how hard-mask (packages.mask) interacts with PORTDIR_OVERLAY; I'm interested in this because if it works the way I think it does, it might be a feasable alternative to not propegating parts of the official tree.

asimon · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 6:39 am Post subject: Re: Good luck

link · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 6:55 am Post subject:

Yea, I've thought about the copyright issue here. That really sucks, but it does have to bee done.
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Spider · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 9:19 am Post subject: Re: Good luck

link · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 4:32 pm Post subject:

True, all of this rests on whether they will make source code downloadable or not.

I have thought about this copyright/logo issue, and it does seem like the best thing to do would be to make patches that just remove/replace Ximian's copyrighted crap.

This really bugs me. nonetheless. One thing I thought of was that maybe we aren't technically infringing on their copyrights and stuff. We (as the G-XD2 project), are not providing their source code for download. It is not hosted on any of my (or our) servers. All we are providing is a method (standardized for Gentoo users) for installing the Ximian Desktop. Also, we cannot control what users do (individually) to their own builds. (I.E. remove the copyright correction patches).

Package names is no worry. We can just make use of the PORTDIR_OVERLAY package clobbering, and as Matt mentioned to me, use patch levels to override the base GNOME packages.

I feel dirty being forced to create sly little methods like this to get something that I feel should be available to users. Bleh. This is exactly why I hate copyrights and all that legal junk.
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Lin_Matt · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 4:52 pm Post subject:

Have you tried getting in touch with the Ximian folks and seeing exactly what would need to be changed? It seems to me that if the goal is to simply provide the Ximian Desktop to Gentoo users, you may be able to convince em to let the logos/etc stay, albeit with a big honking disclaimer that the ebuilds aren't officially supported by Ximian proper....

link · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 4:58 pm Post subject:

Yea, I've thought of that. It seems like it might be difficult to convince them (especially if their business-type people are in charge of giving these permissions) to give a permission to some guy that's working on providing their product to a different Linux distribution for free.
I'm in class right now, but I'll email them once I wake up (er, once class is over).

We'll see where this goes. Maybe we should get a petition going, and have members of the community who want this to sign it.

Lovechild · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2003 6:35 pm Post subject:

No way in hell Ximian will support a meta distribution like Gentoo - they dropped Debain because it was to old in the stable branch and the development branch changed to often. I think that's the reply you'll get.

But you are free under the GPL/LGPL to use their patches, so a patched up Gentoo GNOME might be the way to go...

But it's always polite to ask first so by all means do that, just remember you are not an official representative of Gentoo, they might get that idea somehow. Hell you might even get some assistance with the source.

Spider · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2003 12:26 am Post subject: Trademark vs. Copyright

I've been in touch with Ximian in the past (inofficially) and while its ok to use their sources (its GPL code, thats why.. you will get sources, sooner or later as the binary is done) you cannot use the Ximian name. I dont think you'll stand a chance to be allowed to do that, since if they allow you to use it, they loose the trademark, and thus a lot of their power and brandname.

Same goes for their logo's and so on.. not much chance there.

that is, you can't call it "Ximian desktop for Gentoo" since it cannot be ximian desktop when its not ximian that are behind it.

You can call it "enhanced gnome based on Ximian sources" however.

To apply their logo/brandname to a product you develop and distribute would be a no-no. however, remember to give credit to them, thats a completely different thing.
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shm · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2003 12:53 am Post subject:

Does anybody know the timeframe of when Ximian's patches are going to merged into vanilla gnome? Do we have to wait for gnome 2.6 or are some things going to slip into gnome 2.4?

I really don't want to have to install Ximian Desktop itself because of bad experiences with it in the past (me+Debian unstable+ximian=reinstall three times)

singular · n00b Joined: 07 Jun 2003 Posts: 54

sisob · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2003 8:03 am Post subject:

dermot · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2003 11:04 am Post subject:

I don't think it makes any odds whether or not you have Ximian's blessing, because essentially all that you are providing is a script (ebuild) that retrieves the source from Ximian's servers and compiles it automatically.

Or are you talking about making changes to the code itself? In which case... I don't think you could (or should) use Ximian's trademarked items. Once you change the code, strictly speaking it's no longer Ximian Desktop or Evolution or what have you.

With regard to the other stuff - I don't know a lot about ebuilds, so this might be a stoopid question - could you guys side-step the vanilla GNOME vs. Ximian GNOME conflict by simply allowing Ximian's GNOME (and extras) to occupy the slots that vanilla GNOME would normally fill?
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Nylle · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2003 12:55 pm Post subject:

Since the installer part of XD2 is an important part of the idea with XD2, I think that by changeing the installer it is no longer XD2.

Therefore I think you'll have problems with Ximian if you use their logos and such.

l8nite · n00b Joined: 16 Jun 2002 Posts: 58 Location: Sunnyvale, Ca

Link, I'll be available anytime you want to come over and bughunt. I'm also good at repetitive/drudgery work (like cleaning out copyright problems), so lmk on IRC or give me a call..

link · Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2003 8:47 pm Post subject:

Ssl · Apprentice Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 178 Location: Serbia

I just visited ftp://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/ftp.ximian.com/ and at least I see Evolution 1.4 final RPMS for RH, SuSE and Mandrake...

Slobo

link · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2003 4:20 am Post subject:

atom · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2003 6:18 am Post subject:

Lovechild · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2003 7:13 am Post subject:

Here you go - enjoy..

http://patches.ximian.com

link · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2003 9:58 am Post subject:

I've looked over some of the patches, and they don't look to devastating. Maybe a better angle for this project to take would be to work on applying the patches into Gentoo GNOME proper. It'd be interesting to see how these patches compare to the latest versions (gaim for example).
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Lin_Matt · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2003 1:13 pm Post subject:

Lovechild · Posted: Mon Jun 09, 2003 2:34 pm Post subject: