(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hi
I found this when surfing the net.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/s ... 576,00.htm

Will this be good or bad for linux.

Regards
Sharke

Will this be good or bad for linux.

I'm curious what BarryK 's take on this is.

Do I think that a commercial company should be able to make a fortune on the back of Linus's work, well, No, not without some sort of compensation.

However, I don't generally believe that trademarking words is a good idea. What about the term GNU/Linux? Will that be covered? Hmm...

Interesting read, thanks for the links. I guess it remains to be seen.

lobster wrote:Will this be good or bad for linux.

Good and necessary.

It is done to protect the free (as in speech) and open nature of Linux.

Without this trademark a company may missled clients to think that the company IS linux. Or that the company produces linux.

e.g. a company called "Linux UK" that would sell linux computers in GB. In this case Linus is saying: "You can use the name to promote linux, you can make money with it, but you have to acknowledge that you don't own the Linux trademark".

It's just a precautionary measure to prevent future headaches. They may even decline to license the linux trademark to someone using it unfairly.

rarsa
I tend to agree with you but linus has a buisness and this would be costing a lot of money and as in any business it has to recoup costs from somwhere.

eg Puppy Linux $200.00 per annum to use linux trademark.

Maybe not

Regards
Sharke

It is good that the place where the action is coming from is near Barry's place. This makes it easy to get the feel and coordinate things for Puppy.

Hmmm.... Make a cool operating system, keep it open source, wait until fifty gazillion people make their own distro, then charge them to call it Linux. Sounds like Linus has been hanging around a certain billionaire lately......

Seriously though, it doesn't look like they're really intent on forcing people to buy a license, and if they did start to get rough about it, just call it "Puppy OS" instead. As long as the name doesn't contain "Linux" they don't care.

I suppose the forum & wiki will have to be renamed to Puppy Linux (R).

Trademark law is confusing and much misunderstood. Trademark is a contest. A trademark owner can never be certain that the ownership will persist. Consider the loss of the Xerox trademark, as now xerox is in the public domain, meaning "to photo-copy."

In the USA, Linux is a registered trademark. See http://www.linuxmark.org/

A sub-license is required if one intends to trademark a phrase containing the word Linux. This is reasonable. In all cases of usage, the registered trademark should be acknowledged. One does not need a sub-license to use the word Linux in journalism, documentation and titles.

This last, titles, is my opinion: One may write a book with the title "Windows Sucks" and not need a sub-license from Microsoft. One may write a book with the title "Replace Windows With Puppy Linux" and not need a sub-license from Microsoft nor LMI. Titles are covered by copyright law. "Puppy Linux" is the title of a creative work, not the trademarked name of a product, so a sub-license is not appropriate. Just my opinion.

JaDy

Thanks for your explanation

Regards
Sharke

Here are the results of that case
http://tinyurl.com/8h48h

and just for fun some Bash commands
http://www.ss64.com/index.html