ssh(R) trademark issues: comments and proposal

[Mate Wierdl]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 12:51:06PM +0200, Tatu Ylonen wrote:
>       - Any product where the command name "ssh" is used must only be
>         licensed under a valid license (i.e., must not be in the
>         public domain).  E.g. BSD license, GPL, and normal commercial
>         licenses would all be ok.
>
>       - An acknowledgement of our ownership of the ssh(R) and Secure
>         Shell(TM) trademarks must be included in the software (help
>         text, documentation, license).  It would not need to be
>         printed out every time the program is normally run, but would
>         need to be included in e.g. in an appropriate place on man
>         pages and in help texts.
>

I wonder now if grep, sed, sh, and other unix commands must be similarly
carefully treated.

What if I have been distributing my little Unix like OS for 20 years,
and this OS has a script called s.sh?  Now you are telling me to
change this script's name?

What if openssh changes its name to opensafesh (but opensafe sounds
better---it even sounds like a challenge), the executable is called
safesh, and INSTALL has

       as a final step, run

       ln -s safesh ssh
       ln -s safeshd sshd
       ln -s safecp scp		# just to be a on the safeside
       ln -s safeftp sftp	# ditto

>     would work to cease using "SSH" as a protocol name and would
>     instead start using the new name.  The new name would need to be
>     unencumbered, and the xx.com, xx.net, and xx.org domain names
>     would be made to permanently point to e.g. the IETF main page.  My
>     own proposal would be to change the name to SECSH, provided that
>     Van Dyke is willing to contribute their currently unused secsh.com
>     domain name for this purpose.  We would be willing to contribute
>     our secsh.org and secsh.net domains on the same basis.

Until somebody comes along, and trademarks/copyrights this name as
well, so we have to start removing secsh from our boxes.  

Do people know for sure that `sh' has not been trademarked in some
obscure coutry?

> 
>   - We would submit an official statement to the IETF that we will make no
>     trademark claims about the "bits on the wire" in the protocol (e.g.,
>     the protocol version strings or the various names used in the
>     protocol).

Again, somebody else will come and trademark the name.  They *will*
succeed.  People might even succeed just trademarking the letter `s'
in places where it might imply `secure'.  

In any case, I am not sure anymore if I can say "ssssh" to my crying 7
months old.

---
Mate Wierdl | Dept. of Math. Sciences | University of Memphis