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1 in 9 Companies Sign Linux Trademark Letter

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wonder-where-this-will-go dept.

An anonymous reader writes "More than 10 percent of the 90-odd organisations which received a letter asking them to relinquish any legal claim to the 'Linux' name have agreed to do so. Jeremy Malcolm, the lawyer who's leading the charge on behalf of Linux Mark Institute, described the response and favorable, saying: "Not all of the recipients were using Linux as part of their business of product/service names. He added that one of the purposes of sending the letter out in the first place was to discern which organisations might use the name for commercial gain."

2 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Free as in ... by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Informative
    Is it just me, or is FreeBSD is starting to look pretty good right now from an ideological point of view?

    AFAIK you can't just go out and call your product FreeBSD coffee, or whatever. The FreeBSD foundation owns the trademark.

    I know for a fact that the NetBSD foundation has been clamping down on people using the NetBSD name in their products without authorisation.

    I don't see how Linus's actions are any different from this.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  2. Re:"Butthead Astronomer" by Woogiemonger · · Score: 4, Informative

    When Apple called a project "Sagan", the astronomer got irritated, and told them to cease and desist. Then they changed it to "Butthead Astronomer": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

    This is pretty funny. What you guys might've missed in the Wikipedia article is that Sagan actually sued to have the project's name changed, and lost. Apple changed it to Butthead Astronomer anyway, which prompted Sagan to sue again, for libel. He lost again, but Apple changed the project name one more time, to "LAW", which stood for "Lawyers Are Wimps". :)

    If every lawsuit was this amusing, perhaps the legal world wouldn't be so sickening.