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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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Why not just create a blanket license which says for what purposes the Linux trademark is allowed to be used, and be done with it. No need to charge companies for it, if, as Linus says, it isn't about the money. It seems to me this would satisfy the requirement that Linus police his trademark.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
Trademark Requirements:
...
1. Does it run Linux?
2.
3. Profit?
I mean, what's the new thing? The previous two articles made it clear that it costs between $200 and $5k. Linus posted about it on LKML and basically confirmed. Why is it a bad thing? Well, if anything blame the trademark system, that someone needs to agressively protect a trademark.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
To prevent more FUD being spread, please read
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
That's the real interesting part of this - Red Hat doesn't have a license, neither does Mandriva. Novell does. So if it's good enough for Red Hat not to have a license than it's good enough for me.
After several days of reading about this subject and totally wrong commenting on it myself, here the groklaw link:0 92029989
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050816
This article links to
http://www.linuxmark.org/
This explains everything, so a lot of projects should pay, but at this moment they are just trying to make up for the cost of protecting the trademark by going after big players (>1mln US$).
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.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
The trademark just means that you cannot call yourself "Linux".
If you call your distro "Swaziland Linux", you need to buy a license.
If you call your distro "Swazilandix" or "Swaziland Operating Environment", etc, you don't need any license at all.
If you start selling soda and call it KevinConaway Coke, you need a license from Coca-Cola. If you call it KevinConaway's Cola, you're ok.
Trademarks are different than patents or copyrights. They exist to protect the integrity of a brand -- not the ideas.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
" the whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."
- Linus Torvalds, 20 Aug 2005
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
But I've already paid $699! How can they charge me again for the same thing?!
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Red Hat doesn't have one because they aren't using 'Linux' in their name. It's Red Hat, Inc.
Makes me wonder though why Novell pays, being that they are "Novell Inc.".
What about the product: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux"?
Interestingly, I notice that the Red Hat web site doesn't use "Linux" on the front page except in direct reference to RHEL.
Get your Unix fortune now!
As has been explained at great lengths on groklaw, you are absolutely free for example to make a Linux distribution named "Knoppix" without having to pay anything, and obviously you are allowed to say "Knoppix is a Linux (R) distribution. Linux (R) is a registered trademark of the owner of the Linux trademark."
You are not allowed to create a distribution and call it "Knoppix Linux" without paying for the trademark. And Microsoft is not allowed to distribute "Microsoft Linux" without paying for the trademark. And once Linux takes over the computing world, Microsoft will not be allowed to rename "Vista" to "Linux" and distribute it as "Microsoft Linux" at all, in order to retain a tiny bit of market share, because Linus can refuse to let anyone use "Linux" in a product name if it isn't Linux what they are selling.
Now THATS insightful!
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
Trademark law is different from copyright law. The fact that in the US the same governmental agency handles both doesn't make them the same.
The software is free, and you don't have to pay to use it. If you want to register a trademark which contains "Linux" in it, then you need to license the use of "Linux".
Linus also said:
;]"
l kml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95+&hl=en [Google cache}
"[ And don't get me wrong - I follow slashdot too, exactly because it's fun
to see people argue. I'm not complaining
Since it's now salshdotted, see http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:HR1UTE7bLf0J:
[i]I guess information wants to be free, but not as in beer.[/i]
A trademark is hardly 'Information' in the sense of the word that free software advocates would purport it.
Consider if Microsoft created a terrible linux distro purposely, and called it Ubuntu, and marketed it as Ubuntu (not assocaited with MS) on the web. The people over at the real Ubuntu would want to fight back. That's the power of the trademark, it protects your name and image, not your 'information'.
Probably worth mentioning, because some people seem to think it's an issue: it's not necessary to infringe upon a trademark to make a program work the way you want it to work. There's nothing inherently wrong with trademarks, either in theory or in practice, in fact, when properly used they provide a useful way of ensuring people can't pass off their stuff as something else.
Not that they're impossible to abuse, but I don't see any evidence Linus is abusing them. Actually, I'd go further than that: At the moment, Linus isn't making any money from the operation, seeing it as something that should be self-funding and non-profit. I know a lot of people are defending him against supposed charges that this is not what's happening, as if there'd be something wrong if it was a profitable operation.
But if he wants to make a profit from it, I'm not going to criticise him for that. He did some initial work that, while it may be overrated (the GNU tools form a bigger, more complicated, and IMNSHO, more useful part of the end user operating system than his kernel), was useful to many people and captured a lot of mindshare. He associated a corruption of his name to that program. And he has managed that project for more than a decade. In the view of most free software people, and I'm one of them, it would be unethical for him to be rewarded by crippling the program itself, preventing people from being able to improve it and to help one another. But making money from the mindshare aspect, from being able to say "This is Linux, the Real Thing. The version officially blessed by Linus Torvalds, as you can see from the name"? That's fine by me. That's actually beneficial to everyone.
The software continues to be free. Sure, my version will have to be called "Squiggix". Your version will have to be called "Nuclearelephantix". The fact we can't call them Linux, we can't claim they're the real thing without actually funding the project, is hardly damaging to our freedom. And it certainly helps Linus, should he ever want to, to make sure his name is only a[tt]ached to versions he has control over (a key artistic moral right - nobody should have to be associated with something they didn't endorse), and helps end users choose on the basis of active support for Linux, and the stamp of approval of a known person.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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.
Most of you probably do not remember him. He fraudulently registered the Linux trademark in 1996 and asked people to pay for use of the name "Linux".
Many of you now seem to think the name Linux does not need to be protected. You either have short memory or are too young to know what battles Linus had to fight to get here.
Most of you are free-loaders anyway. Interested only in what you are getting for free and contributing nothing back. Most of you given half the chance would have really cashed out on Linux, unlike Linus Torvalds.
See: http://www2.linuxjournal.com/article/2425 for some of the history.