On Sun, 17 Aug 2003, Lance Davis wrote: >We have always felt that cheap cds are a good way to introduce new >users to different distributions, and some will then go on to purchase >boxed products or support contracts, or recommend that their companies >roll out a particular distro and it really hasnt done redhat any favours >having their brand diluted, or sold as 'pink tie' etc , possibly because >of their lawyers misunderstanding of the way that gpl software is distributed. Red Hat has very good lawyers who know a lot about the GPL and have spent most of their time defending it when used in products that do not give any support. The main issue is that TradeMark law is very very explicit. If a company does not defend their trademarks to the death they will lose them if challenged later on it. It is up to the owner of the trademark to show that they have done their best in making sure that the trademark is not used by others no matter how silly the case may be. In comparison to normal trademark controls Red Hat has been very good about even allowing the name to be licensed. One of the big issues other than Trademark concerns was that the number of support tickets that would be opened to Red Hat when the product was bought without Red Hat support elsewhere. At one point in 1998, for every 5 tickets being opened up, about 1 was for a CheapBytes CD, 2 were for MacMillan CD's, and the other 2 were legitimate tickets. It didnt matter that the CDroms had labels telling them to get their support at XYZ place. The people would still go to www.redhat.com and expect it to be supported because it had Red Hat's name on it. -- Stephen John Smoogen smoogen@xxxxxxxx Los Alamos National Labrador CCN-5 Sched 5/40 PH: 5-8058 Ta-03 SM-261 MailStop P208 DP 17U Los Alamos, NM 87545 -- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --
