Australian Linux Trademark Holds Water

Seft writes "The Inquirer is running a story in response to the recent Linux trademark news in Australia which was previously covered on Slashdot. The story was dismissed as a hoax by many, but now it seems that Linus Torvalds is dead serious." John 'Maddog' Hall stated for the article that the move was not about getting a slice of anyone's action but purely to protect the quality of products that utilize the Linux name.

Comments

Any apologies from the slashdot crowd?

[Richard_at_work]

After all, some of the things said about the lawyer involved in this case were less than civilised or polite, and indeed a lot of posters had him mixed up with someone else of a similiar name. So, anyone willing to retract what they said?

Re:Uh huh.

[awkScooby]

It's about loosing your trademark if you don't defend it. Linus holds the trademark "Linux", so it's up to him to take actions to protect that trademark. If that means "control," then yes, it's about control.

It helps to show that you've made a good faith effort in defending your trademark if you have documentation showing how you've licensed the trademark, and if you've gone after people who have not licensed that trademark.

If Linus does nothing, Microsoft could call the next version of Windows Linux (not that I believe that would happen), and nobody could do a thing about it. Knowing the Patent Office, Microsoft would then be granted the Linux trademark, and would charge $10 per copy... Chaos would ensue, etc.

Free as in speech

[tezza]

This needs to be ammended to

Free as in Speech, as long as you don't use our Trademark.

But a lot of open source licenses have exactly this restriction, like the Apache License

6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.

And lots of others too, mainly extending from the time when Open Source was driven from universities Berkely, MIT who didn't want their 'Trademark' abused.