Rendezvous Renamed to OpenTalk

Gogo Dodo writes "Back in August, Slashdot covered Tibco suing Apple over the Rendezvous trademark. AppleInsider now reports that the lawsuit has been settled and Rendezvous' new name will be OpenTalk." Meanwhile Zeroconf sits in the corner and cries.

More lawsuits to come

[Biotech9]

Apple (and MS) are both being sued over 6 patents held by BTG, which their pnline updating systems allegedly violate.

Link here [infoworld.com].

Looks like fun and games ahead for Apples lawyers.

Re:OpenTalk?

[SWroclawski]

There was a time the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org) tried to make Open Source a trademark, but it didn't work out. "Open Source" as a term pre-dates the "Open Source" as a replacement term for Free Software by a long time.

In addition, various groups used the "Open" word before Open Source, such as HP's "OpenView" desktop environment.

Yes, it looks like Apple is trying to purposefully confuse people by prepending "Open" to this product, but maybe this will prove once and for all that any term like this can be hijacked, just like the Open Source people believe that the term Free Software is easily misunderstood.

Taco...

[mritunjai]

"Meanwhile Zeroconf sits in the corner and cries."

Taco, if you're ignorant, then don't bother adding your comments.

OpenTalk/Rendezvous IS ZeroConf!! OpenTalk/Rendezvous are just the names given to Apple's implementation of ZeroConf.

Just like:
* 801.11b/g was named AirPort
* 30" LCD display was names "cinema display"
* CIFS implementation is known as Samba
* IEEE1394 is known as Firewire

Zeroconf is known as OpenTalk/Rendezvous!

Is that clear now ?

Re:Apple Apple Apple ... Orange?

[proj_2501]

I think you misread/failed to read the article. Apple is changing their product's name. Tibco is not.

Re:OpenTalk?

[the_proton]

Rendezvous (or OpenTalk or whatever) already is, and always has been open source.

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/rende zv ous/

- proton

Re:In Other News...

[syates21]

Yeah that's the same.
TIBCO has had a patented networking protocol called Rendezvous for years that is the core of their whole business. It runs a few small systems you may have heard of like, oh, NASDAQ.

It's not too hard to see why they might be upset at another company coming out and promoting a completely different and unrelated networking protocol with the same name.

Re:Taco...

[ZackSchil]

I believe he was referring to the fact that the ZeroConf name was tossed out not once but twice, and the second time, it wasn't used even though the last name had to be discontinued due to legal issues. The name was crying, not the technology.

Re:Bad Choice

[Rosyna]

Well, maybe you don't realize this, but Rendezvous basically *is* AppleTalk for TCP/IP. It has all of its benefits, nearly all of its features and it works with normal Routers and TCP/IP hardware.

OpenTalk is the perfect name.

And, FWIW, AppleTalk only has a bad name because the first version (Phase I) had a problem where it would get too chatty. This was fixed in Phase II which was released shortly after Phase II and has been available for over 10 years now. But people's opinion of AppleTalk was already ruined so it basically never recovered.

PS. A recent problem with AppleTalk is that the new Macs that could boot Mac OS 9 are way too fast for common routers. For instance, if the spanning tree protocol is turned on, it is possible for a mac to send a request about AppleTalk and finish booting before it got an answer. This was the origin of the message "Your AppleTalk network is now available" at bootup on a lot of macs.

To highlight the product similarities

[phoebe]

Tibco's Rendezvous can be used to the do same task as Apple's Rendezvous, i.e. dynamic configuration. They both use multicast and don't require server endpoint configurations like addresses, etc. However Tibco's Rendezvous can also do generic, certified, and transactional messaging and hence Apple's product description does harm by implying Tibco's software has less capabilities, i.e. inferior, to what it really is.

To update the trademark links, Tibco [tibco.com] was formally Teknekron [archive.org]:

• Teknekron's trademark [uspto.gov] - filed July 10, 1995
• Tibco's trademark [uspto.gov] - filed May 20, 2002
• Apple's trademark [uspto.gov] - filed May 6, 2002

Re:OpenTalk?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say it would be a reasonable name if the "OpenTalk" protocols are published and freely available to third parties (I have no idea if Apple is planning this or not).

They already did [apple.com]. They've released code for Windows and Linux so they can make use of this technology. They even wrote an IE plugin. Not to mention that Apple programmers wrote the white papers on ZeroConf/Rendezvous/OpenTalk.

Re:OpenTalk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rendezvous/OpenTalk is an implementation of ZeroConf, ZeroConf is an open standard, therefore Rendezvous/OpenTalk is an implementation of an open standard.

Beyond that, Apple's source code for their mDNSResponder (the core of Rendezvous/OpenTalk) has been available under the APSL since it debuted in jaguar, and therefore is open source.

So I'd say OpenTalk is a reasonable name to use (espescially in comparison with AppleTalk which did the same thing in an apple only sort of way).

Re:What about OpenTransport?

[Have Blue]

Open Transport is still present; it's Carbon's high-level networking API.

Re:Any OpenTalk/ZeroConf servers for *NIX?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Yes indeedy. Apple has made the source code for a POSIX implementation of the Rendezvous daemon available on their web site [apple.com] so you can download it and build and run it on any POSIX-compliant system. (So they say. I haven't touched it myself in nearly a year.)

For something like a printer, your best bet would be a Rendezvous proxy service that runs on machine X and advertises a printer service on printer Y. It requires configuration on your part, but only once for each device or service you want to proxy. I believe the source for a POSIX proxy responder is included in the Apple source tree as well.

Re:OpenTalk?

[argent]

Which license does the original program use?

APSL, which is like "GPL for everyone but Apple".

the Rendevous program itself does not appear to be Free Software from what I found on the web site

Which web site? this one? [apple.com]

Re:Bad Choice

[connorbd]

I worked for a summer at my college, which was setting up one of the first broadband cable installations in the world at the time (summer of '95). The IT guys did NOT like AppleTalk for precisely that reason.

AppleTalk is nice for LANs. I use it myself (or more precisely the AppleTalk Filing Protocol, which has run primarily over IP since, I don't know, around '98 or so), even on OS X, because it's still more smoothly integrated into the system than anything else, but Apple (wisely, I think) made a herculean but partially failed effort to get rid of it simply because there was no need for it anymore with TCP/IP taking over everything. What ZeroConf/Rendezvous/OpenTalk is doing is bringing the last important piece of AppleTalk functionality -- the ability to announce services -- available to the TCP/IP world.

Now between BootP/DHCP and OpenTalk, there is no further need for AppleTalk except on legacy networks.

Apple's *Talks were more than transport protocols

[danieleran]

AppleTalk is not just a transport protocol; it's a suite of networking protocols. Much of the functionality of AppleTalk was in its auto configuration ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) and NBP (Name binding protocol) as well as discovery features. Other *Talks were simply AppleTalk over non LocalTalk cables (LocalTalk was the original serial cables used to network Macs).

So as simple LocalTalk cabling was replaced by Ethernet networks, Apple referred to AppleTalk over Ethernet as "EtherTalk". TokenTalk was AT over Token Ring. "PhoneTalk" was another vendor's replacement of LocalTalk with phone lines. All the Apple *Talks were AppleTalk. Not just a transport protocol, but a whole set of AppleTalk features available on whatever data link and physical layer you installed for it.

When TCP/IP started replacing local transport protocols (such as AppleTalk and Microsoft's NetBIOS / NetBEUI), Macs generally kept using AppleTalk in addition to TCP/IP, because AppleTalk provided features unavailable in TCP/IP. In fact, Apple has tried to get rid of AppleTalk in the transition to OS X, but recently returned to turning AppleTalk on by default in new installations of OS X.

Turn off AppleTalk for Mac OS 9 users and their super simple Chooser (for browsing printers and servers) stops working, and the Mac users get upset.

Apple migrated the benefits of AppleTalk to TCP/IP and in doing so basically invented ZeroConfig. They released the technology suite to the IETF intending to make it open standard. The Rendezvous marketing name was first applied to ZeroConfig as a principle feature in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.

They already had published ZeroConfig / Rendezvous as an open standard so anyone could implement the technology (as Tivo and several printer manufacturers have), but Apple has also actually written the code for POSIX and released it as open source so that Linux and Unix users could share the same benefits that Apple invented for AppleTalk over standard TCP/IP.

With that in mind, OpenTalk is a useful name to describe what ZeroConfig is and what it does. It's AppleTalk features applied to TCP/IP. Rendezvous was a mysterious marketing name that nobody seemed to get the point of without observing what some Rendezvous enabled app could do. In that sense, it was a lot like Expose: hard to explain, but instantly demonstrable.