Correction: Jeremy White of Codeweavers emailed me to let me know that I'm very confused on this.:
Chromium isn't my name; it's Googles, and it's their open source project. They distribute bundles with explicit permission to use both source and binaries in those bundles. (In an irony, in fact, they accidentally messed up and included Chrome trademarks in a bundle that they gave permission to use, so we had to strip those out and replace them with Chromium branding).
Based on a range of posts I saw on the web this morning, which conflated Chromium with Codeweavers that it's not surprising that I was confused. Mea culpa, and sincere apologies to Jeremy and the Codeweaver gang.
Codeweavers, the company behind WINE which enables Windows applications to run on Linux, has done it again. WINE was voted a finalist in Sourceforge's Community Awards earlier this year, earning the dubious distinction of one of the open-source projects "Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation."
This may be true where patents are concerned, but I think Google would have a pretty good trademark claim against Codeweavers right now.
In this case, Codeweavers has made it possible to run the Google Chrome browser on Mac OS X and Linux, and called it "Chromium." As Codeweavers founder and CEO, Jeremy White, notes on his blog, Codeweavers was "looking for a way to show off Wine's new maturity, particularly for porting applications."
Great, right? Yes, except for the name. Chromium has the potential to confuse would-be users as to the source of this cross-platform instantiation of Google Chrome.
United States trademark law is pretty clear on this point:
... Read moreArs Technica notes Google's good deed for the day: contributing code improvements to the WINE project (open source implementation of the Windows API for Linux, Unix) to improve interoperability with Adobe Photoshop and Dragon Naturally Speaking, among other things:
Google software engineer Dan Kegel posted a message to the Wine mailing list last week describing some of the improvements to Wine that Google has sponsored in the past year. These improvements, says Kegel, have substantially improved the Linux compatibility of several popular commercial software applications, including Adobe Photoshop and Dragon Naturally Speaking.
I'd personally rather see more native applications written for Mac OS X and Linux, as I've never met an emulator that really delivered in terms of stability and performance. Still, WINE is a good project and it's good to see Google actively contributing to a wide variety of open-source projects.
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