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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 $20 million... [so that Lindows] will give up the Lindows name and assign related Web domains to Microsoft.'" We've previously covered the Microsoft and Lindows conflict in some detail.
What a liar!
It appears Michael Robertson is nothing but a liar!
Lindows Steals Copyrighted Art and Promotes Porn
We're not happy about this - we're upset that Robertson gave up and sold out. It doesn't matter how much effort MS has put into promoting their non-trademarkable mark, it's not a reasonable trademark! A lot of us were worried that Robertson was in this for the money, not the principle of the thing, and we were, sadly, proved right.
There was no particular outcry when the OSS Phoenix browser was forced to change its name (to, eventually, Firefox). Granted, it wasn't MS who forced the change, but "Phoenix" also isn't a generic term of art. Not exactly the same as what you claimed, but fairly close. If you really want to test your hypothesis, why don't you make a spreadsheet for X11 (easy to fork gnumeric or oocalc) and call it X-cel, and see how many people rally behind you. I certainly won't.
I tell you what. You stop applauding MS's attempt to defend invalid trademarks, and I'll promise not to applaud any attempts on their part to defend any of their valid trademarks! If you can't make that deal, then you're clearly a troll, not "insightful".
MS named a competing product almost the same thing, there would be OSS bedwetter outcry galore.
Like XWindows, Microsoft Windows, XBasic and XBox? Funny, that.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Seems to me that LINDOWS is a combination of: LINUX (first three letters) and WINDOWS (Last four letters) Should the Linux community have been outraged that he was joining that OS with Windows? Unfortunately that also included the last 6 letters of Windows. Was he in it just for the money? If you were $5 million in debt, had already changed your name for Europe, and had a chance to pick up a cool $20 million, which way would you go? Would a court case in which the loser would appeal and keep eating away at your company for 4-5 years be a real alternative to a struggling company? I think not. Going to court for the principle would have probably been the end of Lindows / Lindspire.