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EFF Says Mark Shuttleworth Is Wrong About Trademark
sfcrazy writes "Last week Canonical sent a cease and desist letter to EFF staffer Micah F Lee asking him to remove the word Ubuntu from the URL as well as the Ubuntu logo from the site. Lee responded through an attorney who said that Canonical's 'request were not supported by trademark laws and interferes with protected speech.' Shuttleworth apologized, though it was cheeky, and while he dubbed the Mir opponents as non-technical (hello KDE, systemD, Wayland, Intel) he also went on to explain why they needed to protect their trademark. Now there is an official response from EFF. In the blog post EFF has explained that Shuttleworth is far from reality and was totally wrong about trademark."
I think you might be confusing patent and trademark.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Did Microsoft order all glass companies to quit using the word "windows"? Or, to put it another way, "[citation needed]"!
I believe with trademarks context is everything. I can go to a store and buy an apple (the fruit), but if I buy an "Apple" electronic device, if it isn't made by Apple Inc (the computer company), then lawyers will be coming down hard! (There is also Apple Corps Ltd, owned by the Beatles. There have been trademark disputes between Apple Inc and Apple Corp Ltd, none of which will affect you buying apples (the fruit)),
Interestingly, the article itself said that although it believed Shuttleworth was wrong, it didn't believe he meant any malice.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
It seems that the RDF (reality distortion field) has temporarily moved from Apple to Canonical.
IMHO, Canonical has lost the plot. They are trying to do far too much. Far too many fingers in far too many pies for my liking.
When you compare them to RedHat you see a world of difference. RH seem to go about their business very quietly, making tons of money and contributing lots to the FOSS and Open Source movement. Not that I don't have some gripes with RH (I'm a RHCA,RHCE sort of person) but IMHO they are in a different world when you compare professionalism.
Think about distros like CentOS. Source code compatible with RHEL but with the trademarked branding removed and replaced with something different. RH lawyers are happy. Many customers are Happy as well. They get what is effectively a supported Distro as zero cost. I deal with several who have just a few servers under support from RH. The rest run CentOS.
However given the ferocity of RH's Laywers in cases where RH are being sued, I really wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of them. NAZGUL mk 2 perhaps?
He's not talking about those people, he means the thousands of screaming idiots that act like football fans over if vi or emacs is the superior text editor, except these people are much worse then the past text editor wars. Today we have thousands of people bitching about "how dare Canonical not use Wayland, Upstart, Unity" as though open source was only about using what Redhat shits out.
I actually clicked the last link to try and RTFA. Damn, that is the worst piece of writing I've seen in a while. No wonder the summary is crap as well. /. why do you link to these shitty articles? I was expecting to get the EFF site, not some random "tech journalist" who couldn't pass 5th grade English!
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Shuttleworth/Canonical are just using the Facebook playbook:
1. Engage in an outrageous overreach.
2a. If there's no reaction: proceed.
2b. If there's a negative reaction, then walk it back just far enough to quell the outrage. Use weasel words. Pretend that you were just kidding. Call it an unfortunate oversight, a lapse, a mistake -- but be sure not to admit that it was deliberate and calculated.
3. Wait for outrage to die down.
4. Return to step 1.
This works beautifully on an audience that isn't paying attention, that can't generalize from specifics, that doesn't remember what happened yesterday, let alone last year or last decade.