rebranding for Fedora

[Tank Program]

I've been contacted by a Fedora maintainer about including AA, the only problem is the name is a potential trademark infringement. The way around this would be a new name for the copy of AA in Fedora. So, here's a poll. (WeasleCycles was suggested in homage to the Debian-Firefox situation.)

[limburgher]

Hi, I'm Jon, the Fedora maintainer mentioned above. I'm more than open to changing the rebranded name. On of our more legally-minded folk is looking over my work so far, but as it stands all I've done is GiMP the splash screen and change a like in the configure script.

AFAIK, the only bit to avoid in the new name is the word Tron, but I'm tryying to get some clarification on that, before I vote.

[limburgher]

Tom "Spot" Calloway wrote:
--
The issue here is the "TRON" trademark, which is held by Disney.
Fedora's legal counsel has advised us that having a "TRON" videogame
which uses the trademark to describe itself is almost certainly
trademark infringement. Since Fedora doesn't want to expose itself to
unnecessary legal risk, we cannot include Armagetron as is. This policy
applies to all trademarks used in software, not just this case.

Perhaps "LightCycles" would be a better name than WeaselCycles, but
anything without "TRON" in it will probably be fine.
--

[ed]

Seems the already is tron game called LightCyles.
But it has been inactive for years by the looks of it.
How about Armagetroff? Doesn't sound too cool.

[Lucifer]

How about "WormsBeforeTron"? Kill two birds with one stone.

IN that case, anything that preserves the abbreviation "arma" is cool with me. That's simple compatibility. Fedora users will want to join us here, and besides "tron", "arma" is the most common abbreviation of the game, so Fedora's rebranded distribution should try to preserve that.

Edit: If it were me, I'd just go with Armageddon Advanced, since the word "Armagetron" is just armageddon with two letters changed, and therefore shows complete continuity. Failing that, just call it GNU/Tron so you can force Disney and the FSF to join forces for once.

Edit2: FOr your patch....

The game is designed to be rebranded, believe it or not. Ideally you'd just do some configure switches to tell it what to name it's executable and directories, and point it at the appropriate splash screen and translation files. If it doesn't work so easily and you have to hack it, please keep us in the loop so you can prepare an actual patch that finishes this work for us. It's theoretically work that's finished, but it's never been tested afaik, and I think me and z-man did all of this work under the watchful gaze of a lot of people telling us it wasn't necessary.

[limburgher]

How about "WormsBeforeTron"? Kill two birds with one stone.

IN that case, anything that preserves the abbreviation "arma" is cool with me. That's simple compatibility. Fedora users will want to join us here, and besides "tron", "arma" is the most common abbreviation of the game, so Fedora's rebranded distribution should try to preserve that.

Edit: If it were me, I'd just go with Armageddon Advanced, since the word "Armagetron" is just armageddon with two letters changed, and therefore shows complete continuity. Failing that, just call it GNU/Tron so you can force Disney and the FSF to join forces for once.

Armacycles would fit that bill.

[Tank Program]

Hey Jon, thanks for clearing that up, and welcome to the forums. Personally I'm in favor of Armacycles. I like the Armageddon Advanced idea, but that doesn't really tell you anything about the game unless you happen to already know of AA. (Maybe Armacycles Advanced then?)

[Lucifer]

Heh, bump, I edited my post while you guys were posting. Guess I should be quicker about that stuff, but jumping on a trampoline scrambles your brain! (man, 4 minutes is a long time on a trampoline)

Edit: Heh. Hey tank, can you add Armageddon Advanced to the choices so I can (predictably) vote for my own idea?

Edit2: DOn't post while I"m editing! Yeah, armacycles advanced works, with the problem that the word "armacycles" doesn't make any sense, but then neither did "armagetron", so what am I complaining about?

[limburgher]

I've voted to Armacycles, with the intent of meaning Armacycles Advanced.

Once something is decided upon, should I use my modified splash screen, or would someone like to contribute one more closely modeled on the original? What I've made is essentially the original, with the topmost block blacked out, and WeaselCycles added in in white, in italics, somewhat tastefully. Looks OK, but not as good as the original. I can obviously change this to the new name.

[Lucifer]

You might want to run this by your lawyers, but my preference is an entirely new one that contains the text "http://www.armagetronad.net". We can hold a contest for such, if you'd like. That's how we usually get new graphics for releases. You guys don't have to go it alone, and there's lots of good graphic designers hanging around here that would just love to help out.

Edit: Also, we'll be perfectly willing to host in our svn repo anything you need to build your distribution if you're willing to provide patches and work through that mechanism. Which reminds me, I'd promised to grab the ubuntu stuff we got awhile back but haven't yet, better do that. Anyway, the idea being that when we release on our own schedule, it would be awfully nice if we could release our own packages for Fedora that have whatever level of integration the standard Fedora packages have, and our Fedora users can help us test that integration. It makes our own releases that much better, and that much easier for you to QA the work and include it on your repositories.

If subversion, particularly sourceforge's subversion, supported it, I'd be happy to give a representative from each distribution write access to a little area for their own distribution, but I guess we're still waiting for something like that.

[Tank Program]

Ok, I've updated the poll, changing Armacycles to Armacycles Advanced.

[Z-Man]

It would have been "Cylcotron" Only that is a well known experimentation device. But Armacycles Advanced is better for our purposes anyway.

[limburgher]

I'd be happy to accept a new logo, and including the URL should be fine, but I'll check.

I looked at the poll results. Do we expect more votes, enough to make this "too close to call", or should we declare consensus and run with Armacycles Advanced?

[Tank Program]

Whoops, that's a typo Z-man, I'm pretty sure at least.

As for "Armacycles Advanced", I think it's OK to run with. I figure if anyone had any problems with it they'd have spoken up for now.

[limburgher]

Ok, will do. How should we coordinate the new logo, or should I just go forward with my own altered version for now? Having the URL in the logo is fine, btw.