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1 in 9 Companies Sign Linux Trademark Letter
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."
Sounds like the other 9 out of 10 cats said they preferred things stay as they are?
Al Sutton
There was a time when Linux was just a handful of sources on an FTP server somewhere. Full of bugs, but its programmers were full of excitement about getting it up and running.
Now, almost a decade later and the technology is progressing at a rapid pace and people everywhere are loading it up on their systems. I guess there really wasn't any other way for the system to evolve except into a bureaucracy. It's sad in a way.
What is sad is that it's no longer about the code. It's all about who owns what and who can use this or that name. It's a huge business. It's not a hobbyist's operating system anymore.
I guess that's all for the better, I suppose. More business attention means more bug fixes and faster extended functionality. But it kind of loses something intangible when people start thinking like top brass and less like the rank and file.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
On the bright side, this is vastly better success ratio than SCO had.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
no reading comprehension
You sure hit that nail on the head...if you go back and read the summary carefully , you'll note it says "More than 10 percent".
Pot, meet kettle.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I suspect that some of this is about reputation. If Linux is to become a widely-used, trusted OS, then it needs trustworthy businesses to provide trustworthy services. The first step is to control the name "Linux" so that only those companies that adhere to certain standards, codes of conduct, etc. can be allowed to use the marque. Linus can't control the codebase, but he can control the name.
I'm not saying that the Linux Mark Institute is doing this, but it is what they should do as part of the Linux maturation process.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Personally, I think the bigger news is that just under 90% of the 90-odd organisations that received a letter have not responded to requests to relinquish any legal claim to the 'Linux' name.
In other words, 80 of those companies may attempt to assert a legal claim to the 'Linux' name now or in the future. This is a hell of a bigger volume (and worry) than the 10 that said they wouldn't.
Finally, if not all of them were using the 'Linux' name in their business/product/service name - what exactly was the point in sending them this letter? So they could ignore it?
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I think you'll find it's something that Linus himself would rather not do and has no interest in doing - but the way the trademark "system" works is that you have to make a reasonable pretense of defending your trademark (from unlicensed use) or you lose it. It's quite different to other sorts of intellectual property concepts like patents or copyright.
And that's really all there is to it. If you must blame something, blame the system - don't blame Linus (and definitely don't blame LMI or the lawyers they hire).
You have to jump through hoops to be able to legally call something "Unix," so why not Linux? This may sound silly at first, until you realize that certain disreputable organizations may eventually try to deliberately muddy the waters by creating "Linux" products that are not actually Linux. Kudos to the Linux folks for taking the initiative now, instead of waiting for trouble.
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Actually they changed the project to "BHA" (as per the article). Folks were encouraged to infer that it stood for "butthead astronomer".
The codename was for one of the first power macintosh desktops (the 7100/66).
Given that the other two projects were called Piltdown Man (6100/60) and Cold Fusion (8100/80). Given that one was a deliberate scientific hoax and the other a famously premature and wrong press release, Sagan was actually being quite reasonable. Would you like that company?
It's also worth noting that Sagan was chiefly in the news at the time as the highest profile name on the "Nuclear Winter" paper, which had an enormous political impact at that time and was highly politicized (some people didn't like the idea that a global nuclear war couldn't be fought and won).
Oddly enough, while Apple has a fuzzy liberal reputation, plenty of the folks at Apple are conservative or even ultra-conservative, and I suspect that the name choices were someone's idea of a poke at "Nuclear Winter".
For those of you too young to remember all this, "Nuclear Winter" was a catchy name for a very solid piece of science (and despite the title, it basically argued that a major nuclear war would have catastrophic climate impacts, not necessarily making the world cold, but definitely horrible), and dismissing it as pseudo-science is about as intelligent as dismissing "global warming" or evolution.