hoijui wrote:i do not know what is legal/illegal, but the reason why you may not be allowed to use the proper icons is:
you do not label windows with the windows icon, but you label your own product (spring), which is made to run on windows (by you/us, not MS). when using an official MS icon, the user could probably think that the product is made by MS. If it fails in any way (say, it has a menu bar and the first menu item is NOT "File"), you make MS look bad.
Of course that is totally silly in practice, as anyone will know that spring is not made by MS, if it is/was law...
If it's illegal to use the company logo then it's illegal to use the company name. Not to mention, think of all the thousands, no, millions of companies that have probably used the OS names and logos together for multiple reasons. You really think the OS corporations would bother trying to track them all down?
Not to mention, if the law was in place that you can't use a company's logo to complement it's brand name, Microsoft wouldn't just be a rich company, it would probably have world domination for suing those millions of companies.