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Networking (Apple) Government The Courts Hardware News

Rendezvous Renamed to OpenTalk 280

Posted by CmdrTaco from the legal-chest-thumping dept.
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.
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Rendezvous Renamed to OpenTalk More

Rendezvous Renamed to OpenTalk

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  • More lawsuits to come (Score:5, Informative)

    by Biotech9 ( 704202 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:00AM (#9759688) Homepage
    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:More lawsuits to come (Score:4, Funny)

      by Orgazmus ( 761208 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:03AM (#9759733)
      bahagha! pnline isnt a real word! PWND!!

    • Re:More lawsuits to come (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mbbac ( 568880 )
      U.K.-based BTG Plc has sued Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. for allegedly infringing a patent that covers Web-enabled software update technologies, the company announced Wednesday.
      The strange thing is that Apple's Software Update isn't Web-enabled.
    • So I wonder if the movie IRobot is going to get sued or apple is going to produce a robot like that in the movie.

      ***** SPOILER for IROBOT ******

      In the movie IRobot, a cop chases down a robot that is running through the crowd with a purse. It appears that it's the first case of a robot committing a crime. The cop tackles the robot and the contents of the purse drop out to the feet of a woman whereby she grabs an inhaler the robot was rushing to here to save her life.

      ***** No more spoiler *****

      This woul
    • Interesting that they should include Apple in the lawsuit. While Microsoft Update is definitely web-enabled, Apple's Software Update just uses the internet, you can launch a web browser if you want more detail on an update, but otherwise the "web" isn't used at all. Not unless you so loosely define the web as anything that uses an IP to communicate.
    • Finally, we learn what "2. ????" means!

      2. File a patent, and submarine it.

      The 376 claim patent [uspto.gov] emphasizes its utility in "pushing" new content to a subscriber of a electronic magazine. A relic of the dot-com boom, perhaps?

      6,557,054 was granted on April 29, 2003, from a April 20, 2000 filing, but some of the claims were based on applications filed as early as Apr. 29, 1996, and over the course of those years, it's brought in several dot-com fads.

  • Let me get this straight: (Score:5, Funny)

    by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06&email,com> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:00AM (#9759701)
    I got this tattoo for nothing?

    Okay, this time I mean it: No more product-based body modification.

  • Tibco gets sued by Buick, which has a car named Rendezvous.

    • Re:In Other News... (Score:5, Informative)

      by syates21 ( 78378 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:12AM (#9759808)
      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:In Other News... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) * on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @11:08AM (#9760310) Homepage
        TIBCO Rendezvous is not a networking protocol. It's an enterprise-scale messaging system. Pretty much the only thing it has in common with Apple's Rendezvous is that they're both software and they both use the network.

        To be honest, anybody who is genuinely in the market for TIBCO's Rendezvous is not going to confuse it with Apple's Rendezvous.

        Think of Apple Rendezvous as a 4-door luxury sedan and TIBCO Rendezvous as a 150 ton mining truck. Yeah, they're both vehicles with four wheels, but you'd have to be an idiot to confuse the two, even if they share the same name. What's more, it's the mining truck company doing the suing--is it really plausible that customers for such a specialized product are going to confuse the heavy-duty industrial solution with the Joe Everyman one?

  • now (Score:5, Funny)

    by TexasDex ( 709519 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:02AM (#9759716) Homepage
    Cue "Lindevous" jokes.

  • Bad Choice (Score:5, Funny)

    by Johnny Mozzarella ( 655181 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:02AM (#9759721)
    Sounds too much like AppleTalk.
    I can hear the IT folks gripping.

    • Re:Bad Choice (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rosyna ( 80334 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:19AM (#9759882) Homepage
      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.

      • Re:Bad Choice (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I would say "too chatty" is an understatement, the term "Appletalk storm" was a common term back in the days. We had a lab full of Macs and they went bonkers one weekend, using up all the bandwidth from our department building to our school's main gateway to the internet.

        • Re:Bad Choice (Score:4, Informative)

          by connorbd ( 151811 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @02:24PM (#9762632) Homepage
          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.
      • Do you know of a fix for this issue? We've set PORT FAST on all of our switches, but we still are getting the same problem. And AppleTalk isn't scheduled to 'go away' for us until the end of the year.
    • It's supposed to sound like AppleTalk since ZeroConf / Rendezvous / OpenTalk is inspired by AppleTalk [wikipedia.org].
    • This is probably a joke, but . . .

      AppleTalk as a living protocol suite is pretty much dead, and will be used in legacy environments only. As a name, it was dead even before OS X, when they came out with new streams based code for MacOS 9 which included AppleTalk and TCP/IP (so long to the hack that was MacTCP) and called it OpenTransport. Though it supported things other than AppleTalk, when it came out, it was such a breakthrough, there was an effort to brand all of networking OpenTransport and depreca

    • Re:Bad Choice (Score:5, Funny)

      by BurritoWarrior ( 90481 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:50AM (#9760153)
      I can hear the IT folks gripping.

      Yeah, well it's hard for us to find girls.

  • Slashdot has been taken over by Apple! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Al Dimond ( 792444 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:03AM (#9759724) Journal
    I, for one, welcome our translucent overlords.

  • OpenTalk? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by proj_2501 ( 78149 ) <mkb@ele.uri.edu> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:04AM (#9759736) Journal
    I'm sure Apple registered that trademark a LONG time ago. In fact, I think it's been used before for something else.

    LocalTalk, OpenTalk, PowerTalk, AppleTalk, MacinTalk, KanjiTalk, ZhongWenTalk, etc. etc.

  • terrible name... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rizzo420 ( 136707 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:04AM (#9759748) Journal
    they should've named it iTalk to go along with all the other apple names.

  • Taco... (Score:2, Informative)

    by mritunjai ( 518932 )
    "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:Taco... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ZackSchil ( 560462 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:14AM (#9759839)
      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.
    • Just so that it is straight:
      • Samba is known as CIFS implementation.
      • Firewire is known as IEEE1394

      In these 2, the common name was first.

  • branding (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:06AM (#9759762) Homepage Journal
    I have always thought the 'Rendezvous' name was so non-Apple. Seems like every Apple technology is ThisTalk or ThatTalk, ever since the first Macintoshes that could "talk" to cabled devices like printers. This "OpenTalk" initiative name makes more sense for the Apple brand, it would seem.

    Now that Apple's got a pretty good speech-recognition and text-to-speech engine, all the networking talks have to compete with the real talking for cute marketing terminology, such as "PlainTalk."

    • Re:branding (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:29AM (#9759973) Journal
      Except that *Talk has generally referred to technologies for allowing computers to talk to each other (i.e. exchange information. Rendezvous is a protocol that allows computers to meet each other, but not talk (the communication part is usually done over TCP or UDP, Rendezvous is a discovery mechanism). As such, the Rendezvous name is much more apt than OpenTalk.

  • Confusing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pldms ( 136522 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:08AM (#9759784)
    Given that the issue was that there were two things called 'rendezvous' the statement:

    Rendezvous' new name will be OpenTalk

    doesn't really help :-)

  • Can they rename to FireBirdFoxCaminoTalk? (Score:5, Funny)

    by cant_get_a_good_nick ( 172131 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:15AM (#9759846)
    Is there a Mozilla implementation?
  • So who has the trademark on OpenTalk? Can the next person in line to sue us please step up to the counter!

    /greger

  • rendezvous with what? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Translate that headline in French and it give you something like Tibco doesn't want you to use the word "meeting" or "appointment"

    Or more simply, the English word rendezvous.
    http://dictionary.reference.com/searc h?q=rendezvou s

    can they realy do that?

    I know, it's like the old Windows vs windows (and no, I won't mention french windows) but think about it.

  • To highlight the product similarities (Score:5, Informative)

    by phoebe ( 196531 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:21AM (#9759896)

    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]:

    • Note the ORDERING of those last two.

      When Teknekron became Tibco, the lawyers never transferred the trademark. Yeah, really stupid. Amazingly so.

      It wasn't until they went to get their dander up towards Apple that anybody realized that, whoops, they didn't actually own the name any more.

      Looks like a case of legal incompetence, coupled with not perfect corporate research, led to a situation where legally Apple had claim, but Tibco had a use claim. I suspect both parties declared no harm no foul. Apple w

  • At least they did not try... (Score:3, Funny)

    by grunt107 ( 739510 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:22AM (#9759900)
    CoffeeTalk!

  • Take That, Frenchies! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Michael_Burton ( 608237 ) <michaelburton@brainrow.com> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:25AM (#9759937) Homepage

    Shrewd marketing. Rendezvous always sounded kinda French to me.

    Everybody knows us Amurricans in the red states don't like nothin' French. Suddenly I feel like goin' out and buyin' me a big bunch o' Apples!

  • Doesn't Apple . . (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aarku ( 151823 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:31AM (#9759995) Journal
    google these things before they settle on a name? Tibco's Rendevous has been around for a while. It takes 5 seconds and saves big headaches later . . .
  • There was that OpenTransport thing Apple used to have on Classic. They could've just resurrected that name, couldn't they? Maybe call it OpenTransportX or something. Or iTransport. Or iNetwork or iTalk.

  • Any OpenTalk/ZeroConf servers for *NIX? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FLoWCTRL ( 20442 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:35AM (#9760026) Journal
    Does anyone know of open source tools for configuring Macs using ZeroConf? It would be nice to have printers auto-configured when mac users plug into our UNIX network. For now they can use IP or the samba service, but those require that the user actually know something.

  • From the Apple Legal section... [apple.com]

    LocalTalk,
    OpenTalk,
    EtherTalk,
    PowerTalk,
    A ppleTalk,
    MovieTalk,
    PlainTalk,
    MacinTalk,
    Kan jiTalk,
    TokenTalk,
    and lest we forget ... HyperTalk!

    How about a Talk to unite all 'Talks?

  • Stop stealing Generic names (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:39AM (#9760069) Homepage
    Trademarking a generic name like Windows is stealing from the Commons.

    It does not get any better stealing from foreigners in this case the French.

    How wouild you all feel if a French company decided to Trademark Meeting it's laughable.

  • My business strategey..... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HighOrbit ( 631451 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:43AM (#9760108)
    will be to go through the dictionary and append the word prefixes "Open", "G", "e", "Free", "K", and "i" to every word and then trademark them. I will be the King of Trademarks. Anyone contemplating releasing any computer product must pay me unreasonably large amounts of money. I will be rich!

    Ok.. Let's get started, OpenAardvark(tm)(R), GAardvark(tm)(R), e-Aardvark(tm)(R), FreeAardvark (tm)(R), KAardvark (tm)(R), iAardvark(tm)(R).....
    • Nice idea. Won't work.

      It costs money to register trademarks. Then there's the issue of multiple territories and trademark protection only applying where you've registered. The killer though is if you don't use a trademark you loose it.

      Damn - sorry - sense of humour bypass kicked in! Probably because some bright spark modded you as "Interesting" rather than "Funny".

  • They're running out of combinations... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @10:57AM (#9760208) Homepage
    OpenTalk, AppleTalk, HyperTalk, LocalTalk, MacinTalk... ...BabelTalk, YadayadaTalk, JargonTalk...
  • Apple then announced a special version of OpenTalk for the French market called Beschwichtigung-Gespräch, and added the complete works of Ricahrd Wagner to the iTunes music store.

    Oh, I'm being mean again. I'm sorry.

  • I had a bitch of a time spelling Rondyvous/Randyvous/Rendavous... where's that freakin' spell checker!?!?
  • Good. Now I can finally spell it. Randevoo? Rond-debvu? Ranzdovouses? So confusing!

    But OpenTalk... now THAT's easy! Way more Apple-like.
  • Rendezvous on Champs-Elysees
    Leave Paris in the morning on T.E.E.
  • To the age old question, "Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet?"

  • I finally learned how to spell it (Score:3, Funny)

    by MyDixieWrecked ( 548719 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @12:14PM (#9761225) Homepage Journal
    Right when I finally learn how to spell rendezvous...

    ...they decide to change the name to OpenTalk.

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