Microsoft and Lindows Settle Trademark Case

An anonymous reader writes "According to an official press release hosted over at Yahoo, Microsoft and Lindows have settled their trademark case, and have announced: 'Over the next few months Lindows will cease using the term Lindows and transition to Linspire globally as our company name and primary identifier for our operating system product.' Although it's claimed: 'Terms of the settlement are confidential', ZDNet has an article filling in more details, including the fact: 'Microsoft will pay upstart Linux seller Lindows $20 million... [so that Lindows] will give up the Lindows name and assign related Web domains to Microsoft.'" We've previously covered the Microsoft and Lindows conflict in some detail.

Comments

This is one case where I was rooting for microsoft

[Bold Marauder]

Seriously, the linspire people are not the kinds of companies I, personally, would like to see carrying the Linux/OSS banner forward any more than I'd want to see claria be our standardbearer.

Hopefully after being forced to change their name will cause computer companies to consider bundling other "distributions" (if you deign call "lindows" a "distribution") such as mandrake or fedora wich are much more free (as in speech and as in beer), and who have not based their business model on a combination of selling free applications and having a name that sounds like 'windows'.

Redirecting web domains

[Roached]

It seems that redirecting web domain will cause consumer confusion. Joe consumer who doesn't know any better will go to the Lindows site only to find Microsoft and then assume they are the same thing.