Re: help grub config (fwd)

[Kord Campbell]

Okuji,

The reason we chose the name was because we thought that a) no other
company or project was using it, and b) that it was a catchy name.

I did a search for the name "grub" prior to naming the project and
the company in an attempt to alleviate this type of situation.  At that
time, which was late 1998, I did NOT find any mention of the term "grub"
in association with any other Open Source package, search engine product,
or corporation name.  A trademark search also came back negative on
"grub" in our's or your space.  (Fact is, only one company had "grub"
marked, and they make some rubber product.)  In other words, we *tried*
to do the best that we could to ensure we weren't bumping into anyone
else's name.

Our domain name was registered mid 1999, and we formed the company in mid
to late 1999, which pretty much sealed up the company name for us.  At
that time, both grub.net and grub.com were already registered.  grub.com
operated as a company named Grub for a short time after that (some guy
here in Oklahoma that has nothing to do with us), but now is just a link
to some lame portal site.

If you look on Google at the number of newsgroup postings discussing the
term "grub bootloader", which were occurring prior to mid 1999, you will
find around 255 posts.  If you do the same search for the period from mid
1999 to mid 2000, you will find around 381 posts, and for the next year
period about 1600.  It becomes evident that the Grub Bootloader project
became well known sometime between 2000 and 2001.  It was only in late
2000 that we became aware of the name conflict or of the bootloader
project itself.  Your success and name recognition today is, of course,
quite high.

We have taken a few steps to alleviate this conflict, one of which is
renaming our executable to grubclient.  Our primary goal has always
been to have a Windows release, and as such, reason that there shouldn't
be much conflict in Microsoft land between the two projects.  (I'm
talking about executable names or man pages here of course.)

We already mention this name conflict in the UNIX README, and have for
over a year and a half now:

>Notice
>======
>The main executable has been renamed to "grubclient" out of respect for
>the GNU Grub bootloader, who's executable is named "grub".  They were out
>first, so we decided to pick another name.  If you have a catchy
>suggestion for a new name, please let us know.

Our logic so far has been thus:  As the Grub Bootloader project does not
compete in our space, and we do not compete in its, and as the bootloader
project is not a company, but instead a project, a conflict in the name
or business space should not exist.

All that said, I will make the following pledge to the grub project:

Should the owner of grub.com eventually decide to part with his domain,
and Grub, Inc. manages to obtain that domain, Grub, Inc. will give, at
no charge, the domain grub.org to the Grub Bootloader project.  At the
same time, should the Grub crawler project close down in the future,
Grub, Inc. will give, at no charge, the domain name grub.org to the
Grub Bootloader project.

That's the best I can do to make things right!  :)

I'll continue pointing users that email us to your site, and I would be
more than happy to create any aliases here to redirect mail to your site,
should you so desire.

Take care,

Kord Campbell
President
Grub, Inc.

On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:

> At Thu, 21 Nov 2002 11:59:45 -0600 (CST),
> Kord Campbell wrote:
> > Sorry about the name thing.
>
> It would be a good idea to add this item into the faq on www.grub.org:
>
>       "Why was the name Grub chosen, even though another project (a
>       boot loader) had been using the same name since 1995?"
>
> That's just the cause of trouble, you know?
>
> Cheers,
> Okuji
>

-- 
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Kord Campbell                                       Grub, Inc.
President                      5500 North Western Avenue #101C
                                       Oklahoma City, OK 73118
address@hidden                            Voice: (405) 848-7000
http://www.grub.org                        Fax: (405) 848-5477
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