Red Hat Trademark Issue Explained

There's been a significant amount of confusion in the past couple days over the issue of whether Red Hat was requiring everyone who was re-selling the distro to no longer mention Red Hat anywhere. That, thankfully, is not the case. Click below to get the full skinny on what you can - and can't - do with the Red Hat name. Thanks to Melissa London at Red Hat for sending this information over. The information in question is from Bob Young, CEO of Red Hat.

Re: Amazon's concerns over fake Red Hat products.

Red Hat received a call last week from Amazon.com. They were getting complaints from Amazon customers who had purchased products through Amazon's auction site from sellers they believed to be selling products from Red Hat Inc. These products turned out to be CD-ROMS that consisted of free ftp downloads of Red Hat Linux, produced by independent vendors.

In order to avoid confusion and to protect our trademarks we explained our trademark policies to the Amazon staff. This is simply that you may download and resell Red Hat Linux. You should not, however, attempt intentionally or otherwise, to confuse buyers into thinking they were buying Official Red Hat Inc. products.

So we request that independent vendors call their product something other than Red Hat, and not use our trademarks or logos. They may -describe- their product as containing Red Hat Linux, but the product itself must have another name.

All of the reputable vendors of low-cost CD-ROMS that contain free ftp downloaded versions of Red Hat Linux follow this policy without our even requesting it. The current problem has arisen because of the large number of new, sometimes-less-than reputable suppliers who are using retail outlets like Amazon.com's auction site to trick customers into believing they were getting Official Red Hat Linux from Red Hat Inc. at a bargain price when in fact they were getting a cheap knock-off product. Red Hat depends on the open source software development model, and our customers rely on Red Hat Inc. to supply the benefits of this open source model to them. For this reason we publish every line of code we write under open source licenses, in effect we do not own any proprietary software. But we do own our trademarks.

The purpose of trademark law is to enable vendors to identify their products for their customers. If anyone could call their ketchup "Heinz Ketchup" consumers would have no idea when they were buying the product from the Heinz company, and when they were buying a cheap knock-off.

The way trademark law works is that if you do not police your trademarks, if you allow anyone to use those trademarks without permission, then you will eventually lose control over those trademarks. So we grant permission to use our trademarkednames generously to those who ask permission, and we will continue to insist that others do not use our trademarks without permission or in ways that confuse our customers and the marketplace.

This is the problem that Amazon.com wanted us to help them address for their customers. And it is the reason we will continue to enforce our trademarks whenever and wherever anyone attempts to infringe on them.

Cheers, Bob.

ps. The term Red Hat Linux GPL is neither a sanctioned term by Red Hat, nor is it accurate - a significant amount of the code in Red Hat Linux is licensed under BSD, Artistic, X, NPL, and other open source licenses.

Comments

Explaining the obvious...

[Rick_T]

I just wonder what all the fuss about this was to begin with. Redhat doesn't want to be bugged with support requests from people who bought cheap CDs that Redhat doesn't see a dime of return on. They also don't want people buying said CDs thinking they're entitled to said support and feeling cheated.

This, to me, seems perfectly reasonable. This also seems to be exactly what they were doing even when we *didn't* have the note from Redhat above.

Reasons to buy Official Red Hat

[Mark Gordon]

There are several reasons to buy the Official version of Red Hat (or any other name brand distribution)

• Support This is the big one, and this is why real money is needed. For every 1000 users of the official version, a certain number will require support, so this actually eats up a share of the cost that can't be amortized over a large number of sales. Note that the grizzled veterans can buy a less expensive version of Red Hat from Red Hat that doesn't include support. What does it include? Read on.
• Coasters You're paying a little something for the CD. Note that those who sell copies only have to pay for the CD's and don't see any of the other costs. For those, keep reading.
• Documentation You get some sort of book with instructions, some of which are bound to be handy. Dead trees cost money, at least a couple bucks. On top of that, someone has to write the stuff. I pay for Perl books from O'Reilly at least in part to subsidize Larry Wall, just as I pay for GNU books at least in part to subsidize RMS.
• Distribution-specific Research & Development The people who design the distribution (decide where to put things, what permissions they should have, and take the time to compile, install, test, and package all the packages) need to get paid. This can be made up by volume of sales.
• Non-specific Research & Development Money to support the folks who are doing research for Red Hat (or whatever distribution) that is of benefit to the whole community. Alan Cox is the poster boy for this concept, but a number of others do paid work for Red Hat and other distributions that ultimately benefits all Linux disributions. This is one reason to pay full price even if you no longer need support. The community can use about as much money as we can dump into it. Not all distributions are created equal in this regard: some give back more to the community than others. Shop around.

The cheap versions also have their uses:

• Evangelism If I pay $2 for a CD, I'm more willing to loan it out to newbies who want to take Linux for a test drive. If they need support, they can call me. I tend to keep recent versions of pretty much all the major distributions, and this is the only way I can keep this affordable.
• Testing I've been burned on this. If you're actually releasing binaries for Linux, it's a good idea to test them on a bunch of different distributions. Keeping up with a bunch of different distributions is most affordable when you pay $2 for them.

In defense of Red Hat:

• As someone pointed out in a comment on the previous article, there's some risk of clueless newbies buying cheap copies and thinking they come with support. When Red Hat tells them they haven't paid for support, clueless newbies can get upset. Clueless newbies are like that. Still, we as a community generally want to avoid pissing off newbies, since it's bad for evangelism.
• Software patents inherently suck. Keeping source code in Jack Benny's vault inherently sucks. Security through obscurity sucks. These things all exist in order to protect IP owners, and they're of no real benefit to consumers. Copyright, when abused, sucks. However, in many cases, it's actually intended at least in part to protect consumers. If some bastard sells copies of Red Hat CD's and tries to pass them off as official, he's not ripping off Bob Young nearly so much as he's ripping off the poor suckers who get mislead into thinking they're buying a support contract, keeping Alan Cox supplied with penguin mints, etc. Some of the legit bargain resellers make it quite obvious that they're selling the "you-get-no-support" version. Linux Mall even goes so far as to encourage users to buy the full-price versions. They presumably (I'm guessing here, but it's a pretty safe guess) buy the official boxed versions wholesale, making the official version more profitable for them and leaving them with no real financial incentive to sell the cheap versions.

I'm glad the information came straight from Bob.

[Anonymous Coward]

It really endears me to Red Hat that we'd get the scoop straight from the head of Red Hat explained in a well thought-out, clear manner. They obviously thought it was important to take the concerns of the community seriously. Keep up the good work!

Knee-jerk reactions

[kjz]

What really amazes me is how quickly and vehemently many people reacted when this story first appeared. Instead of waiting to hear all sides of the issue, many people automatically assumed the worst.

It seems to me that there is a very prominent fear in the Linux community of any attempt to commercialize Linux. I have seen countless comments over the last few months (here on /. and elsewhere) fearing or predicting that Red Hat would begin to walk the same path that Microsoft has. Many believe that somehow Red Hat would hijack Linux and pervert it for their own purposes. They somehow equate the high visibility that Red Hat has obtained with the tendency or desire to make money at all costs, including screwing the consumers and end users.

When I first read the hubbub surrounding the Amazon.com letter, I didn't jump to conclusions. I knew that Red Hat has maintained an excellent reputation for being open and fair, and preventing all uses of the Red Hat moniker outside of officially sanctioned products didn't seem to fit with that reputation. Red Hat is not a company to fear. Not only are they unable to hijack Linux (thanks to the GPL and other licenses), it would be a very bad business decision. They would lose the trust and support of the very developers and community they rely on in order to provide their product.

Red Hat has done a great job of being open and honest with us in the past. They really do deserve the benefit of the doubt when situations like this arise. I can only hope that those who have risen up against Red Hat in the past will take this into consideration before vilifying them in the future.