Are the words " Word,Excel,PowerPoint" are proprietary
 

Hi all,
Can I Rename the OpenOffice Components like
OpenOffice.org Writer,OpenOffice.org Calc.....etc
to be Word,Excel......

Are the words " Word,Excel,PowerPoint" proprietary
of Microsoft.
Can I use them.

Thanks In Advance,
Sailaja Bhandaru

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/trademarks/:p

Though of course, there is nothing stopping you from renaming them on your own computer for yourself. They are only going to start getting annoyed (or even know) if you start distributing the renamed things.

Well, you just did, so I suppose you can.

Since you probably meant "May I use them?," see the previous post for rule regarding trademarks. Basically, you may use a trademark if you label it as as such, and identify the owner.

That's the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

/troll off

"Word" is actually too generic for Microsoft to protect, just as Windows is. Heck, if it were an issue I'm sure that Wordstar and Wordperfect would have reamed Microsoft back when those companies were dominant.

Microsoft hasn't been able to protect "Windows" by itself - only in combination with the word "Microsoft" so I don't think that releasing a "Word" product would be much of an issue.

Moved to General, not a Linux question.

agree, now programs like Excel or Outlook, or what not, that might be a different story, but for Word I would see no problem with that.

I have even seen a GUI that used OO as its office suite, but to not confuse newbie computer users, let alone new to linux, the school used all of the MS icons for Word, Excel, Outlook, etc...

had a very nice GUI IIRC. it had the school medallion, for lack of a better term, in the center with the school colors as the background with the IE logo, and all of the office logos from MS Office.

it was a small private university so if they can do it, i suppose you can to for your personal desktop.

As mentioned above, unless you start marketing the icons and names as your own, you should not get in much dutch with MS.

FWIW, it's easy for Microsoft to protect their icons (they're both trademarked and copyrighted) via both copyright and trademark law, so in a university setting or any other setting where public may have access I would avoid using Microsoft Office icons for the applications. That's a lawsuit waiting to happen, and Microsoft would be perfectly justified in protecting their logos.

Hmm. It seems they were able to bully Lindows away from using a variation of the word "windows" as applied to an OS.. forced them to change it to Linspire.

I guess it would be bad idea to release my "Windows Source Code Edition" distro then.


http://img382.imageshack.us/img382/3821/newboot7lb.gif

LoL



..........

Don't want to break any copyright laws NOW. Do you?


:p