Back in August, Slashdot covered Tibco suing Apple over the Rendezvous trademark. AppleInsider now reports that the lawsuit has been settled and Rendezvous’ new name will be OpenTalk.
Ouch. If this is true it’s going to be a major setback for Apple’s Muticast DNS (which is already known as both Rendezvous and Zeroconf). The timing could also not be much worse. Rendezvous/Zeroconf is poised to find its way in to daily use across platforms. Apple recently released a technology preview of Rendezvous on Windows, re-released Rendezvous for Linux, and made awesome use of Rendezvous in their Airport Express with Airtunes product.
This will be a major blow to a technology that already has confusing dual-branding. I do like the retro throwback reference to Appletalk though.