DRBD Trademark

[Kavan Smith]

https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/serverguide.pdf

This doc does not seem to reference LINBIT, or the DRBD trademark.

"DRBD® is a trademark of LINBIT in Europe, USA, Asia and many other countries."

The server admin PDF guide does not make reference that DRBD is a trademark, and that it is a product of LINBIT. As a partner in the open source community, we kindly ask to have reference to our company name when referring to our product, as well to include proper trademark references for DRBD.

We (LINBIT) are an open source company providing free GPLv2 code, both in Ubuntu and in the Kernel Mainline. We hope that it is relevant to the open source community that companies like Canonical are existing off their own independent efforts without big sponsorship deals like Mozilla or Apache.

Support your partners in open source please :) Please fix these references.

Best,
-Kavan

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Reassigning to the serverguide.

I don't know anything about DRBT, but I did see that Wikipedia also doesn't use the registered trademark branding in their DRBT article. So to follow that example, how about:

"Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) mirrors block devices between multiple hosts. The
replication is transparent to other applications on the host systems. Any block device hard disks,
partitions, RAID devices, logical volumes, etc can be mirrored. DRBD is developed by LINBIT."

DRBD's website is already linked directly in the references at the end of the section.

[Phil Bull (philbull)]

We've discussed the issue of referencing trademarks before. The conclusion, if I remember correctly, was that we're under no legal obligation to include trademark references. Note numerous unreferenced uses of the trademark "Windows" throughout the docs.

In this case, I think that including a link to the DRBD website is appropriate (and we already have a link). That website has more information on LINBIT as the developer of DRBD, which users will find if they are interested. I appreciate that the company would like to increase its exposure to potential customers, but I don't think that user documentation is an appropriate forum for that. There are many more companies whose products are referenced in the documentation without trademark information or similar.

[Kavan Smith (kavansmith82)]

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for the response. This modification would be appreciated.

Best,
-Kavan

On 09/06/2011 05:06 PM, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> Reassigning to the serverguide.
>
> I don't know anything about DRBT, but I did see that Wikipedia also
> doesn't use the registered trademark branding in their DRBT article. So
> to follow that example, how about:
>
> "Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) mirrors block devices between multiple hosts. The
> replication is transparent to other applications on the host systems. Any block device hard disks,
> partitions, RAID devices, logical volumes, etc can be mirrored. DRBD is developed by LINBIT."
>
> DRBD's website is already linked directly in the references at the end
> of the section.
>
>
> ** Tags added: serverguide
>

[Kavan Smith (kavansmith82)]

Hi Phil,

Your observations are true, however we want folks to be able to get in
touch with the authors of the code in case they wish to submit bug
reports or code snippets.

I think we can agree Windows is a bit more mainstream than our company,
and they are also a proprietary software firm. Meaning they have
resources outside of the community to get bug reports, and stay in touch
with their users.

LINBIT maintains and develops over 99% of the DRBD code. Meaning, even
though we are GPLv2 software, we get very little code submissions from
the community. Even though we are one of the most installed open source
technologies.

DRBD.org will be retired at some point soon, we feel it wise to let
folks know that they should be referencing to LINBIT for DRBD resources.

This is not an interest to gain exposure; moreso provide resources to
your users as to where they can get information moving forward.

GPLv2 is free, producing the software is not. It requires many man
hours of time from professionals, both in a paid for sense, and in
volunteer aspects. We want to be sure folks can get in touch with us
directly if they have bugs/issues or need support for their installations.

Please let your user guide reflect a reference to our trademark, and a
reference to our developers (LINBIT) as it is important to us that folks
can find content/documentation and resources when DRBD.org is retired.

We spend much time developing and supporting the world's best open
source replication solution. As developers of the best open source
Operating System, we hope that Ubuntu's folks understand how important
it is to know who/where and how to get support/file bugs for an open
source project. Linking to the authors of the code is very important in
our opinion.

Best,
-Kavan

On 09/07/2011 01:00 AM, Phil Bull wrote:
> We've discussed the issue of referencing trademarks before. The
> conclusion, if I remember correctly, was that we're under no legal
> obligation to include trademark references. Note numerous unreferenced
> uses of the trademark "Windows" throughout the docs.
>
> In this case, I think that including a link to the DRBD website is
> appropriate (and we already have a link). That website has more
> information on LINBIT as the developer of DRBD, which users will find if
> they are interested. I appreciate that the company would like to
> increase its exposure to potential customers, but I don't think that
> user documentation is an appropriate forum for that. There are many more
> companies whose products are referenced in the documentation without
> trademark information or similar.
>

[Phil Bull (philbull)]

Hi Kavan,

Of course, providing a means for users to access other support resources for a product is an important function of our documentation. This is why we currently provide a link to the project website for DRBD. If the DRBD.org website is soon to be retired, could you please give us the URL for the new location of the project website so we can modify the documentation?

I do not see how including trademark information or including a sentence explicitly naming LINBIT as the developers of the software is preferable to providing a link to the project website. If the aim is to provide users with information on how to get further support, file bugs, or submit patches, then surely a direct link to the project website is much more efficient than simply giving them the name of the software developer (plus irrelevant trademark information) and expecting them to search for it?

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

Moved to serverguide

[Doug Smythies (dsmythies)]

I don't know what is going on with this one or what is expected or where. setting to invalid to get it off the list of stuff.