[CentOS] Linux Trademarked?

Mike McCarty mike.mccarty at sbcglobal.net
Tue Aug 23 21:53:05 UTC 2005


Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 12:43, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> 
> 
>>>Can you give proper copyright credit on the Linux kernel without the
>>>name Linux?  A quick grep through the source tree shows the word is
>>>used thousands of times.  If there are restrictions on the usage, how
>>>do you reconcile that with the GPL requirement that prohibits
>>>additional restrictions?
>>>
>>
>>Yes ... that is a linux kernel
>>
>>You can't use "Linux" in the name of your company or the name of your
>>product without permission.
> 
> 
> So how do you describe your product, giving proper credit without
> infringing?  Have you cleared everything up with RedHat after getting
> the same kind of letter from them.  And if so, are you sure you wouldn't
> be sued out of existence anyway if it were some company other than
> RedHat under the same circumstances?
> 

I don't know. I know this: I worked for a company which had a product
named DEX for "Digital EXchange". Later, a company in Japan trademarked
that name, and we spent a *lot* of effort changing "DEX" to "DSCDEX"
in our source code. We were forced to do that. Our source code was
*not* publicly available, and was considered trade secret. So if
a trademark can force a company to remove a name from trade secret
source, I dunno why it wouldn't force removal from publicly available
source.

Mike
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