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Linux Trademark Fun Continues
Orre noted an article running on internetnews about LMI's efforts to
license the Linux trademark to companies that use it. Prices range from $200 to $5k for companies with over a million bucks in revenue.
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I don't see anything wrong with this. He is protecting the name and still allowing it to be accessible to your every day developers/programmers.
If a company has more than 1 million in revenue, 5k is pocket change. While 200 dollars is well within range of a couple of guys programming in their basement. And this also allows some protection for those guys in their basement if someone tries to take their name. They might not have the money for a legal battle, but for 200 bucks they can insure their name.
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
It may not be about the money, but it still costs plenty to keep a trademark. Some money needs to be charged just to break even.
I mean, what's the new thing? The previous two articles made it clear that it costs between $200 and $5k. Linus posted about it on LKML and basically confirmed. Why is it a bad thing? Well, if anything blame the trademark system, that someone needs to agressively protect a trademark.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
After several days of reading about this subject and totally wrong commenting on it myself, here the groklaw link:0 92029989
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050816
This article links to
http://www.linuxmark.org/
This explains everything, so a lot of projects should pay, but at this moment they are just trying to make up for the cost of protecting the trademark by going after big players (>1mln US$).
I only disagree with one thing: A trademark does not garantee quality at the moment of rewarding the trademark. You only know that the product sucked when the trademark is revoked because of bad quality.
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from TFA:
Attorney Jeremy Malcolm has already contacted 90 Australian companies on behalf of Linus Torvalds in order to get them to obtain a license to use the Linux trademark. The letters have brought the issue to the forefront of the open source collective consciousness, yet again.
"You may or may not be aware that it is your legal responsibility to obtain a license from the Linux Mark Institute before you are allowed to use the word 'Linux' as part of your product or service name or brand," the letter states.
Linux trademark licensing is administered on behalf of Torvalds by the Linux Mark Institute (LMI). Fees range from $200 and go up to $5,000 for commercial firms with revenue greater than $1 million. It is important to note that the license is for vendors of Linux products to become a sub-licensee of the Linux trademark. It is not a license for users to use Linux (like SCOsource is advocating).
Though the action has raised the ire of some, the issue is by no means a new one. In fact, the LMI and Torvalds' efforts to protect the trademark date back to at least the beginning of the millennium.
But why charging non-profit uses?
I don't have a problem with companies earning money with Linux based products to have to pay for using the trademark. But non-profit uses should be cost-free.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
They are creating a derived work of the Linux kernel (taking the kernel.org sources and applying custom patches). They are then distributing this thing as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's not Linux, although it's very close, and it is being sold as Linux. They definitely need to license the trademark. Interestingly, they don't for Fedora Core, since that doesn't have Linux in the name. I would not be surprised it they simply dropped Linux from the name of their enterprise system - Red Hat is fairly well associated with Linux already, so they could get away with just calling it the Red Hat Enterprise System (or whatever). This would have the added advantage for them of strengthening the Red Hat brand, at the expense of the Linux brand, and allowing them to move to a BSD or HURD kernel at some point in the future if this proved advantageous.
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While this isn't always the case, the nice thing about paying for something is the paper trail it leaves behind. When you pay for the license to use the Linux trademark, there is a financial transaction that leaves a veritable homing beacon on your product for the purposes of 'policing' the trademark. Most /. readers have probably already seen, by now, a large number of creative and technology content given the OS wrong license with the appropriate legal battles as a result. This is just a man protecting the name he made.
As it has already been pointed out, trademarks aren't cheap and the name is the only thing that Linux himself actually "owns" in the truest sense of the word. As such, he has a right to charge for the right for people for using his trademark. There are plenty of companies that use the linux technology without the Linux name, afterall. It's not as if he's charging to use the kernel, just the word Linux in your product title.
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You're not paying to use the software, you're only paying if you want to create an entity containing the name "Linux" and wan't to be protected against someone else using that name.
What about things like Damn Small Linux, Linux On A Floppy, Polish Linux Distribution and all those non-commercial Linux distros? If I made a Tiny Linux Router distro for my own firewall, and make it available on my FTP, do I have to rename it, or shell out $200 to continue using the name?
Hi! I bold'ed the part you need to re-read from your own question...
You don't have to pay to use the software. You don't have to distribute it or anything based on it either. You don't even have to pay for selling it. You do have to pay for calling the thing yor distribute "Linux" (or anything which contains "Linux").
For example, Knoppix will not have to pay anything, because it's not named "Linux", but, well, "Knoppix". I'm not sure if "Linspire" is already considered close enough to "Linux" to need a license, however.
Note that software licensing and trademark licensing are two completely different things. For example, if you make a Linux Distro and name it "T-Linux", I'm sure you'll get trouble with the Deutsche Telekom, depite them not being involved with Linux code at all: AFAIK they have a trademark on the initial "T-" part (T-Online, T-Mobile,
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In spirit I agree with you but legally speaking...no dice. You can't call your own burgers "Big Macs", even if you plan to give them to charity.
Torvalds explained that a company could decide not to sublicense and call their product "anything MyLinux but the downside is that you may have somebody else who _did_ protect himself come along and send you a cease-and-desist letter."
Company or not, if you use something that is a trademark, owner of the trademark can send you C&D. That means, if some asshole pays $200 to LMI for sublicensing "Tiny Linux Router", then they take my code (it's GPL, they can), register the domain name, start selling my distro (still everything legal and okay, GPL.), and then send me a C&D letter stating I'm to stop using that name for my distro because it's their trademark and they own the license, so they get rid of the free competition. I still can rename it, and keep releasing under the new name (after removing 500 or so references to the name in the sources and docs), but then I'd better register the trademark of the new name or they license it again and continue litigation until I completely give up development of the distro, and they can continue selling it for a fee undisturbed.
IMHO, LMI should give licenses for quality non-commercial distros for free.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Your list is incorrect.
1. Does it SAY Linux in the product name?
Y - Pay for a License
N - Don't need a License
2. The Linux Name has integrity and is not watered down
Everybody needs to stop jumping to conclusions and read what is actually trying to be done here.
"Once you own a trademark, the next phase (at least in the US) is to make sure it stays protected by policing the use."
That's only one option. The another option is to allow it to become public domain.
Much closer to the spirit of OSS in my opinion, but I'm sure I'll get flamed for saying so.
Trademarks need to be actively guarded to remain valid. And in order to actively guard them, their use needs to be actively monitored. This monitoring requires work and work costs money.
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Trademarks are not expensive or hard to come by, believe it or not. You may be told you need an agent. Believe me, if you are intelligent enough to be a software developer, it is easy to navigate trademark paperwork. You do not need an agent. You need to behave like a developer using a new technology, i.e. read the documents, follow the rules. (Yes, I practice what I preach. I took out 2 trademarks last year, for a total of about 10 hours of actual work starting from scratch, though admittedly it was not the first time.)
My big recommendation: develop a generic trademark that does not depend on appearance. It is a nice stealth weapon.
Why are trademarks nice?
- You use them to protect your own name and reputation
- You can use them in documentation you produce; if anyone steals your work and is stupid enough to leave in the trademark (yes, they are) you have a nice clear infringement and their lawyers will probably tell them to stop or pay up.
- They actually get you taken seriously.
- They do not cause complicated copyright and patent issues of themselves.
I have to add a caveat. In the US trademarks are a bit broken. A trademark in one area is allowed to spill into another, so that our favorite software company was allowed to prevent another company, not a software company, calling itself Gentium. In Europe the rules are clearer and enforced, so if I trademark "we make things that don't suck" as a mark of a software company, I cannot then prevent (say) a manufacturer of compressors from using the same descriptive mark. But that doesn't invalidate the idea. Trademarking the name of a software product, or a phrase associated with it, means that someone cannot simply steal your name and reputation even though they can, perfectly legitimately, reuse your GPLed code.Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
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Watch this Heartland Institute video
There ya go. I am excited! For once someone says what Ive always wanted! Its ok for someone to make money, based on the work that they did.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.