> On Sun, 2005-05-08 at 22:38 -0400, Erik Hemdal wrote: > > Apparently > > someone thinks it's a bit of a deal. > > > > http://www.fedora.info/redHat.shtml > > > > > > Yeah, it's unfortunate that they did that. > IMHO it is too easy to take pissy positions on the web - see it (even > have been guilty of it) all over on mail lists, bulletin > boards, etc. - > when people publish online, very often they take stronger > positions and > say/do things that they wouldn't in a non connected world. I agree, but one man's rant is another man's reasoned discussion. :-) > > It would be better for them to keep those concerns between > them and Red > Hat - publishing like that doesn't really benefit anyone. > I think that for the academic team, such a posting gives evidence in support of their use of the name should the dispute ever get to a court. Similarly, Red Hat's messages on the Fedora site give evidence that Red Hat considers "Fedora" to be its property. These aren't rantings. If Red Hat didn't do this, an infringer might be able to argue "Gee, I didn't know it was any special name." Years ago, I used to read a magazine aimed at authors, called "The Writer". In there, companies with significant investment in their trademarks (Xerox and Kimberly-Clark come to mind) would routinely advertise about this. The message was of the form: "The word 'Bleah' is our trademark, for a brand of frozdibulators that we make. Please refer to 'Bleah brand frozdibulators' and not just 'Bleahs' in your books and articles." Why did they do it? Because they knew that published authors, who might misuse a trademark, were likely to read the magazine. Advertising was one way the companies could protect against misuse and defend the value of their names. An author who subscribed to the magazine would find it harder to claim that he didn't know a particular name was a trademark. I'm not sure I have any more to add here. I hope I can hear more about how this develops. I don't consider Red Hat to be in any way the "bad guys", but I can understand the position of the researchers too. If there were obvious heroes and villains here, I think we'd all agree in one direction of the good guys. But such isn't the case, and that's why the result of this dispute is (I think) important. Erik
