Slashdot Mirror

I have no idea if they are lying or speaking the truth, but it seems that there is more to this story then meets the eye. The link down below will lead you to a document stating that the UYLUG was trademarking LINUX themselves. Anyways, I have asked them to clarify what they want to do with the trademark.

On Fri, 7 Jan 2000, Raindeer wrote:

> Hello peoples,
>
> You're on slashdot, maybe you could join the discussion... and explain your
> side of the story, cause nobody seems to understand why you want to
> trademark LINUX.
>
> greetz...
>
> Rudolf aka Raindeer

Please read our reply to the "open letter" in our site.

http://www.linux.com.uy/contestacion.html

Thanks for your comments.

Best regards,

Francisco Pereira and Enrique Place

Please read LinuxTECH reply to the "open letter" in this page
Por favor, lea la respuesta de LinuxTECH a la "carta abierta" en esta página

Please read LinuxTECH reply to the "open letter" in this page
Por favor, lea la respuesta de LinuxTECH a la "carta abierta" en esta página

Mostly, the bad guys online give themselves away with everything they do. They try and hide it, but... you can just smell it. The lack of feeling for what a community is. The money-oriented thinking. The Microsoftisms in their HTML. Look at the Linux One pages for an example: the stench of ignorant corporate greed and personal small mindedness is hard to ignore.

Well, LinuxTECH Uruguay may be evil for all I know, but... they sure don't smell bad. They come across like one of us. Their site design is nice and clean and quick. The biggest giveaway is their huge collection of links - the bad guys don't link outside their own site in case you might reach another side of the story. Their news page even includes a link to a Slashdot story - and often refers to GNU/Linux.

I'm just convinced that these people are on our side. I hope this can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction soon.
--

Mostly, the bad guys online give themselves away with everything they do. They try and hide it, but... you can just smell it. The lack of feeling for what a community is. The money-oriented thinking. The Microsoftisms in their HTML. Look at the Linux One pages for an example: the stench of ignorant corporate greed and personal small mindedness is hard to ignore.

Well, LinuxTECH Uruguay may be evil for all I know, but... they sure don't smell bad. They come across like one of us. Their site design is nice and clean and quick. The biggest giveaway is their huge collection of links - the bad guys don't link outside their own site in case you might reach another side of the story. Their news page even includes a link to a Slashdot story - and often refers to GNU/Linux.

I'm just convinced that these people are on our side. I hope this can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction soon.
--

This issue raises a point that has already been highlighted in a previous discussion in Slashdot, and I think it is the central point. First let me say what is not an issue here:

• GPL isn't being broken in any way.

  They applied for a trademark, not a patent (some still mistake one for the other).

  They do not seem to be willing to enforce this trademark ownership. In their first page there is a button entitled "How to get Linux" which links to this page, which I dare to try to translate, despite my lousy Spanish (worse than my English!):
  Linux is free and you don't have to pay for licenses or to obtain it. There are companies in the world market which take the burden to prepare Linux "distributions". These distributions are CD's that in genneral include an extensive set of applications, manuals, plus an applications that allows you to install and even administrate your system in a user-friendly way.
  Many development hours are invested in these distributions so as the finished product owns nothing to its commercial alternatives, in most cases including 30 or more days of free installation support. Its cost is much more accessible than that of any commercial software.
  Anyway, these companies have publicly available free internet sites where one can download or update these distributions.
  It is worth clarifying that if you do not have the time or a very fast connection, it is always much more convenient to buy an already assembled and tested distribution.
  Then you have links to the major distributors.

I am convinced that their intention is to protect themselves from an oportunistic move from someone else. I may be wrong.

What is really an issue here is that Linux (and GPL) seem to be pretty orphan when the time comes to protect trademarks and so on. I remember there was a company in Brazl back in 83 called "Microsoft", they started their business about the same time as M$, and the association which leads to the brand name seems to be quite an obvious one, so I don't have reasons to believe that they wanted to fool anyone into thinking they were something else other than themselves. A couple of years later, M$ was already established in Brazil and demanded them to change their name and got a court ruling for that, so the company was renamed "Multisoft". Now, who would act as a legitimate party in such cases so as to protect Linux's name and image? Linus owns the tm alright, but is he willing to put all the energy and resources needed in each case, considering he has other interests right now? (BTW, I'm damn curious about it!) Once we all have an interest in this, would it be fair to put such a burden on his shoulders?

-------------------------