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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 $5k for companies with over a million bucks in revenue.
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Why not just create a blanket license which says for what purposes the Linux trademark is allowed to be used, and be done with it. No need to charge companies for it, if, as Linus says, it isn't about the money. It seems to me this would satisfy the requirement that Linus police his trademark.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
I don't see anything wrong with this. He is protecting the name and still allowing it to be accessible to your every day developers/programmers.
If a company has more than 1 million in revenue, 5k is pocket change. While 200 dollars is well within range of a couple of guys programming in their basement. And this also allows some protection for those guys in their basement if someone tries to take their name. They might not have the money for a legal battle, but for 200 bucks they can insure their name.
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
To prevent more FUD being spread, please read
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
After several days of reading about this subject and totally wrong commenting on it myself, here the groklaw link:0 92029989
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050816
This article links to
http://www.linuxmark.org/
This explains everything, so a lot of projects should pay, but at this moment they are just trying to make up for the cost of protecting the trademark by going after big players (>1mln US$).
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
Red Hat doesn't have one because they aren't using 'Linux' in their name. It's Red Hat, Inc.
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
" 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."
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.
If you had a valid sublicense before August 2004 you are grandfathered in for free. Based on that I expect that Red Hat doesn't have to purchase a license at all. Perhaps Novell did need to purchase a license due to Suse changing hands, or maybe they just chose to opt in and avoid any potential hassle. After all, the cost is quite negligible for them.
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.