Slashdot Mirror
The Two LinuxHQs?
Several people have written in lately to note that LinuxHQ has moved to
Kernel Notes. But the plot thickened recently when
LinuxHQ sprung back to life
looking quite similiar to its predecessor, but with a different
license. Kernel Notes is GPL, copyrighted by the LinuxHQ Project,
but the "New" LinuxHQ is copyrighted by ECS and not GPLd (as
well as not crediting the creator of the nice logo up top).
Can anyone clarify the confusion for us all? I'm getting
a lot of questions about this and a lot of it smells
pretty fishy.
The trademark does not apply to content, here or elsewhere.
The trademark *does* apply to LinuxHQ, just as "Slashdot" applies to this site.
Registration has very little to do with whether or not a trademark exists. Registration is nothing more than notice to the world of a claim of trademark, and extends the geographic range of the trademark; actual trademark is valid without registration in the market in which the trademark is used.
If I sell a product underthe name "Zpd" in the western states, and an eastern company files a trademark for "Zpd," its trademark will be valid in the east and those regions where I have no presence. If I'd filed a federal trademark, I could have blocked the eastern usage. Not having done so, the eastern folks get it where I don't use it. However, if they want to come into my market, they'll have to do it under antoher name, or offer me enough for my rights that I'm willing to sell.
And as a note to the other reponse, the GPL has nothing to do with it, nor with any other trademark. The license or copyright deals with the content, not the name. The name is a trademark difference.
hawk, esq.
That's too close to giving legal advice for comfort.
But as a generalization, all work automatically receives copyright protection in Berne convention countries. However, in the U.S., registration is required prior to instituting an action, and better remedies are available if the work was registered prior to the infringement.
Disclaimer: While I am a lawyer, this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice on this or other topics, contact an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
There's a trademark issue here, too. Someone owned a domain name, while someone else used that name to build up a recognized entity, distributed worldwide.
Who owns the trademark? The domain holder, the intellectual property holder, or a combination of the two? I could make arguments for all three, barring an enforceable agreement between the two of them.
And if it's the IP holder, did he abandon the trademark by switching to kernel notes?
Barring the agreement, this isn't clear cut. Unless the answer is "solely the domain owner," any purchasor of the domain might be unable to use it for a page of the same name . . .
I'll agree the maintenance has been bad. I'm trying to do better. Things seem to break faster than I can fix them though. :-)
For example, the htdig search engine has been broken for quite a while. It would probably only take me 4 hours to fix it - but there always seems to be something more important going on.
The server has been quite unstable lately too - that's my top priority to figure out at the moment. It's colocated, without 24/7 support, so if it crashes on the weekend, it's ugly. I'm going to try to backtrack to 2.2.6 on the machine.
Any ideas? (aside from installing FreeBSD)
I've got 2 sites lined up where I can move the content to, or make mirror sites - but I haven't had the time yet to do that.
Cheers,
- Jim
Well, he did copy some pages that I (and others made).
:-)
I don't really care though. I'm not going to enforce things. I needed a license, so I just picked the GPL because it matched the kernel sources. I probably should have just made my stuff public domain.
Most of the pages are derived from pages Mark originally made, so he does have some claim on them.
I see he's now changed the license on his site to the GPL. That's good.
Legally speaking, he still doesn't have the right to change the copyright notices though. When I took over the site, he assigned copyright to me. He hasn't contacted me in order to do the reverse.
Still, I don't care. I hereby grant Mark Evans permission to change the copyrights on the content he is stealing.
Cheers,
- Jim
It seems to me, from quickly looking over the new LinuxHQ site that a LOT of it is similar, if not identical to, kernelnotes. Since kernelnotes is GPLed, LinuxHQ has some other copyright & distribution limitations, and it can probably be argued that kernelnotes existed with the content and layout (especially the identical content and layout of pages like "linux distributions"), and therefore linuxhq, by re-releasing GPLed material under another, more restrictive licenes, is now violating the GPL.
IANAL, and I don't even pretend to play one.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Hostname %Loss Rcv Snt Last Best Avg Worst
14. pinky.x25.net 27% 56 76 130 108 127 252
15. ecs-128.ecsnet.com 58% 32 76 576 320 733 1125
16. evans11.x25.net 50% 38 76 523 266 726 1132
Now, I personally feel that the linuxhq.com thing was a fiasco, but I admire the diplomacy on the part of kernelnotes. An explanation from the linuxhq guy (Mark Evans) is here. He says he wants it to be better maintained, but I always thought it was well maintained. Well, whatever.
The people who are responsible for the creative content generate the real value, and are the geese that lay the golden eggs. The existing backlog of creative content is always a finite resource, no matter how big a backlog that is. It doesn't matter if we're talking about programmers, authors, musicians, painters, actors...
If kernelnotes now has the people who made LinuxHQ great, then kernelnotes will prosper and LinuxHQ will fade unless they have their own talent (which is, as yet, unproven). In the mean time, if the original creative team that won the award (even if it's only for collating data, there's a lot of valid creative effort in good organization and an intelligible presentation. Ask Tim O'Reilly...) is at kernelnotes, then they should get the "cool site" award. The new linuxhq can earn its own, if it's up to it.
Simple as that. Don't go to the web site and it won't stay up long. The author says he's looking for support on the LinuxHQ is Back Online page, so if nobody helps, the site cannot continue.
Since kernelnotes.org and linuxhq.com are now quite clearly two totally separate entities, shouldn't the link on Slashdot be changed to read 'Kernel Notes' (the LinuxHQ link currently points to kernelnotes.org)? I suppose to be completely nonpartisan, Rob should include a Kernel Notes AND a LinuxHQ link :)
For what it's worth, I've always found what is now known as Kernel Notes to be up to the minute and informative.
Umm... not really the insightful and informative comment that I hoped my first non-anonymous post would be, but there ya go.