This is REALLY getting out of hand.
IT@Cork is a not-for-profit networking organisation for IT professionals. IT@Cork organises regular information and networking events which are free for its members.
One of these events – the upcoming Web 2.0 half-day conference is the target of a cease and desist letter (below) from the legal team of O’Reilly publishers. Basically O’Reilly are claiming to have applied for a trademark for the term “Web 2.0″ and therefore IT@Cork can’t use the term for its conference. Apparantly use of the term “Web 2.0″ is a “flagrant violation” of their trademark rights!
Are you kidding me? Now nobody can refer to Web 2.0 anymore without getting slapped with a lawsuit? I thought they were promoting this as an idea NOT as a trademark to screw over everyone.
Pancakes!
Imagine if it was not just a sharedf ood prep’ idea but was owned by one entity. Oh man you got to jump on things fast, especially after you start hearing it being used everywhere.
Or else it will all slip through your hands like syrup. Or do you like yours savory
And this coming from the crowd that promotes Open Source? Are they going to sue over that too?
Don’t spiders own the rights to “web”? It’s really bad karma to piss off the spider community.
The question is, “Will it stand up?”. After all I remember when Encyclopedia Britannica tried to claim it owned multi media. That didn’t work. These days this sort of tactic might. If it does it will kill W 2.0.
The more I hear about W 2.0 the less I like it.
Simple solution: Drop the Web 2.0 term (the meaning of which is nebulous at best) entirely and use “LAMP” (the open source programming technique) instead.
It will get tossed out (I hope). Microsoft tried the same stunt with the word “Windows” a few years back … didn’t fly then, and I hope to God it doesn’t fly now.
A company must be dooing pretty poorly when they have to sue over stupid shit like this. At this rate I wouldn’t worry too much about it – their company, trademarks and copyrights will be in the toilet before long anyway.
> Simple solution: Drop the Web 2.0 term (the meaning of
> which is nebulous at best) entirely and use “LAMP” (the
> open source programming technique) instead.
Except that Web 2.0 != LAMP. LAMP refers to a set of specific core technologies used to create the core web pages (Linux (OS), Apache (Web server), MySQL (Database), PHP (Web page scripting and assembly)). This is opposed to the Microsoft components of something like Windows, IIS, SQL Server and ASP/ASP.NET.
I was under the impression that the use of web services or specifically the combining of existing services was the core idea behind Web 2.0. The specifics of what is and is not Web 2.0 are still a little vague but the meaning and use of LAMP is very specific and well known. Technically, you could create Web 2.0-ish sites using LAMP.
Why not just call it “New Web Tech” conference and give O’reilley the finger.