On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 21:40, Sean Middleditch wrote: > Why not offer different support URL and numbers for the RHL project? > I.e., any numbers/URLs/whatever in documentation (and thus that > CheapBytes or whoever would duplicate) direct to more informative > messages. Lemme try and touch this one. Remember folks, IANAL. :) So here are our problems. 1. Red Hat has to protect its trademarks, or it will lose them. Thats the way the law works in the US, and we're a US-based company. 2. In the past, when we allowed the low-cost distributors to sell "Red Hat Linux", we got a LOT of support calls on it. Writing unsupported on the CD did not help. Telling people in the phone queue that it was unsupported did not help (people will inevitably just push buttons until they get to a support person). Now, if anyone can help us solve these problems, we're all ears. I think everyone involved in the RHLP from Red Hat would love to see a way for the Red Hat trademarks to be used safely. If it were up to me (and it surely is not), here is what I would do: My idea is to set up an approved vendor program, where, at no cost, vendors can use an approved logo and name, but they must be part of the program and approved by Red Hat. Now, here's where the lawyers need to jump in (and admittedly, our lawyers have plenty on their plates these days). If we do this at no cost, is it binding? We may have to charge a nominal fee to make it hold up in court. Is the program enough to ensure that Red Hat is protecting its trademark? The support problem may be something that we just have to limit and accept. We should make sure that "This product comes with no support from Red Hat or $VENDOR" is written on all RHLP media sold. Put an entry in the phone queue (Press 1 if you are calling for RHLP...) that goes to a prerecorded message that politely reminds the customer that this product has no support options, then offers to transfer them to sales to discuss RHEL, which does have support options. In my experience, nothing scares people off more than sales. ;) Yeah, people are still going to ignore all that and punch through to support, but when I was in support, we were still getting calls on long-ago end-of-lifed versions of RHL. You get skilled at politely telling people that we cannot help them. There is no doubt in my mind that our policies towards the low-cost distributors will have to change along with RHLP. ~spot --- Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> SAIR LCA, RHCE Red Hat Enterprise Architect :: http://www.redhat.com Project Leader for Aurora Sparc Linux :: http://auroralinux.org GPG: D786 8B22 D9DB 1F8B 4AB7 448E 3C5E 99AD 9305 4260 The words and opinions reflected in this message do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, Red Hat, and belong solely to me. "Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal." --- T. S. Eliot
