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