William Warren wrote: > http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25529 > what's everyone's thoughts on this one? Linux was trademarked by someone almost 10 years ago. That person started asserting writes on book publishers and other media outlets. After about 18 months thanx to pro-bono lawyers, Linus was able to wrestle control of the trademark. Since then, he has not enforced it. I'm sure something has now triggered Linus into a legal position where he must enforce it. I'm sure he probably wanted to do it for $1 (like what SSC did on the "Cool It Works With Linux" hardware branding about 10 years ago), but it's probably best that he has built a non-profit institution to deal with the administrative nightmares that would quickly bog-him-down. The same thing happened to Red Hat(R). The trademark issue brought on by Sun -- shortly after Sun bought Cobalt. Long, long story there, but Red Hat ran into the real issue that it had _never_ enforced its Red Hat (R) trademark, and there was a viable case that Cobalt had destroyed the value of it as anything but public domain. Especially when Red Hat got into it with Sun during negotiations, Red Hat had _no_ legal ground to stand on when Sun continued to ship a completely modified version with all trademarks. [ Something SuSE didn't tolerate, hence why Sun had to license from them when they moved to a SuSE Linux base. ;-] Hence why Red Hat is _extremely_ "tight lipped" on _not_ showing any heritage from Red Hat Linux to Fedora Core on their pages. You have to get into the technical Fedora Core pages. The pundits used to use this just to be argumentative, but the reality is the legal issues if Red Hat ever did acknowledge things. BTW, _now_ you'all know why Red Hat calls it "Fedora Core" and _not_ "Fedora Linux" or anything with "Linux." Red Hat was smart, they knew this was coming, and they have planned for it. It is the eventuality of the trademark game. Because no matter how good your intentions are, legal non-sense always kills it, so it's best to setup your community projects with this foresight beforehand. -- Bryan J. Smith | Sent from Yahoo Mail mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org | (please excuse any http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ | missing headers)