Weekly Edition
Return to the Distributions pageSponsored link
Serve your customers, not your servers, with VERIO Linux VPS. Full-access test-drive here.
| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
Red Hat's war on RHEL
(Log in to post comments)
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 17:37 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
I've never been impressed with these kinds of arguments; people will come up with the most convenient name for things. I have a similar reaction to the long-term futile effort by so many to stop people from saying "X Windows" or the like. If people know what you mean, there's no ambiguity, and it's not grossly insulting, it's better to just chill out.
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 17:50 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]
The reasoning is clear: trademarks are only protected if you use them. Allowing people to refer to your product by names other than the official one scares lawyers because they don't want to have to deal with that kind of argument in a case (however implausible) before a court. So they complain to the folks doing the web page, who agree to put it up somewhere. And then it finds its way into a "tips and tricks" page where it clearly doesn't belong. This is just the way big organizations work. You'd really want there to be some level of sanity checking where the web folks ask "wait, is this *really* a tip?", or the lawyers thing "Is RHEL *really* a problem?". But that doesn't happen, because the web people just do the web site and the lawyers just do the legal stuff. Neither really cares about what the product is called. Hell, they probably don't even use it.
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 7, 2008 3:22 UTC (Fri) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]
This is a sort of odd interpretation of trademark. At least in the USA the trademark exists to protect the public, not the trademark holder. The trademark protects the public from such horrors as buying a can of Coca-Cola which is actually filled with Yong Chin Happy Auspicious Beverage.
Who do trademarks protect?
Posted Mar 17, 2008 14:06 UTC (Mon) by kevinbsmith (subscriber, #4778) [Link]
While your example is reasonable, and that may well have been part of the original intent of trademarks, I think you are being too charitable to the big corporations and the "Intellectual Monopoly" movement in general. Generic drugs and store-brand food products are two counter examples. If they are identical inside, why can't they be marketed under the trademarked brand name? Because the trademark owner wants to keep the extra profit that comes with a higher price. I'm not saying that is necessarily a bad thing--just that trademark protection (these days) benefits the holder more than the consumer. Of course with software it's even more clear. In the early Red Hat days, companies selling *exactly* the same bits as RH were not allowed to use the RH brand name. Again, not necessarily a bad law/rule, but to the benefit of the vendor, not the consumer.
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 17:52 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
I think disowning "RHEL" is just an misguided idea of some marketing "guru", whereas "X Windows" is a genuine annoyance for those who don't want to be viewed as developers or users of a Microsoft Windows clone (and it is not a clone).
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 18:22 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
I'm a geezer, and remember people complaining about X Windows back when most PC users were still running MS-DOS.
X Windows
Posted Mar 6, 2008 18:43 UTC (Thu) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link]
The problem with "X Windows" was that Microsoft explicitly warned the X developers back in the day that we might get sued if we used this terminology. Neither then nor now has the X community had the resources to fight a legal battle against Microsoft. The preferred usage was and is just "X" or "the X Window System". Following some recent court decisions, it is likely that the term "X Windows" is safe to use now. However, it now is seen as a sign of lack of clue in the community, so it's somewhat moot. "It's a Window System called X, not a system called X Windows." --late 1980s X Consortium t-shirt
X Windows
Posted Mar 6, 2008 19:33 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
> The problem with "X Windows" was that Microsoft explicitly warned the X developers back in the day that we might get sued if we used this terminology. Just knowing that makes me want to call it "X Windows." :-) I always thought "It's the X Window System, not X Windows!" was just a symptom of tight underpants. I didn't realize there was a legal reason for it.
"windows" is generic
Posted Mar 6, 2008 21:19 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]
Actually, it looked like "windows" was going to be found to be generic before MSFT paid Lindows $20 million to start pretending it's a trademark. If you want to start a company whose name sounds like "windows", there's some potential money in it for you. (I write "Microsoft Windows" instead of just "Windows" to mean the product -- without the "Microsoft", the "windows" is generic.)
X Windows
Posted Mar 7, 2008 7:51 UTC (Fri) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]
But that's nonsense. Microsoft would never have the shadow of a hope of winning such a case, and they know it, so they would never ever even seriously consider even filing it. Imagine the headlines: "Microsoft loses the rights to Windows!" Thing is, such a GUI is known as a windowing-system, and was long BEFORE Microsoft published any such GUI. When they did, they named it "Microsoft Windows", because that was the ALREADY ESTABLISHED terminology. The screen can contain many 'windows', each program runs in its own separate 'window', those are the generic terms.
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 18:56 UTC (Thu) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]
OK, does anyone want to speculate about the relationship between this and the adjacent article?
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 21:17 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
Principle of locality. :-)
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 19:30 UTC (Thu) by digitalboy (subscriber, #29332) [Link]
i know how to say slackware. ;)
Too many syllables
Posted Mar 6, 2008 21:09 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
Red Hat brought this on themselves - seven syllables (eight if you add in a version, and ten if it's a dot release) is too much for casual conversation. Whereas, from a branding and marketing perspective, terms like "Feisty Fawn" or "Gutsy Gibbon" seem to roll off the tongue more effortlessly. :-)
We live in a world whose vernacular (no matter your native tongue) is filled with acronyms. And this isn't just computer science, either. NASA, the U.S. military, and the entire instant-messaging community have vocabularies so incredibly rife with acronyms that it's just a way of life. (Albeit, the IM vocabulary is more of a written-only language.) My CS-themed analogy is that pervasive acronym usage is a form of data compression, a way of increasing data bandwidth in spoken and written language, while preserving semantics.
I don't see why Red Hat is up in arms over this; usually when one mentions "RHEL" in the context of computer OS software, there's really no ambiguity (unless you need to specify the version).
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 22:45 UTC (Thu) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link]
This is just crazy. It's a disease of the modern large organization when lawyers are left to 'run the company'.Before they worry about the 'community' why not clean up their own house first?
Google shows you how much the term RHEL is used in Redhat.
Best off just trademarking the term RHEL and getting over it.
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 23:16 UTC (Thu) by dreadnought (subscriber, #27222) [Link]
Ah ha ha ha. Whatever. I've heard it pronouced "rhail" and have been pronouncing it "our hell" for sometime now. Personally I like the RHEL abbrv as its less to type(tm).
If history is any indicator... (Heading off-topic)
Posted Mar 7, 2008 0:12 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
Perhaps Red Hat is protecting their brand name product from becoming "Our Hell." After all, some may remember how incredibly easily (and quickly) TRS-80 morphed into "Trash-80." Radio Shack/Tandy Corp. had to live that one down for years!
Seven (or nine, or ten) syllables is still a lot to say or write. But, I just noticed that "Microsoft Windows Vista" also weighs in with seven, until you add a version name like "Home Premium" for another four syllables (eleven total).
Even further off-topic: I was rudely corrected by a Mac enthusiast for calling OS X, "Oh Es Ex." He insisted that under no circumstances was Apple's OS to be called anything other than "Oh Es Ten." Oh well...
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 7, 2008 4:11 UTC (Fri) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]
Dang, now you tell me. I recently registered rhel6.com for kicks and jollies, because it was available. Yes, there's a site -- http://rhel6.com :-)
Red Hat's war on RHEL - rhel6
Posted Mar 7, 2008 12:18 UTC (Fri) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339) [Link]
Micah, Micah... You're just BEGGING for a legal love letter from the kind Nazgūl at Red Hat, aren't you? Anyway, I think Red Hat should promote RHEL (pronounced as the "rel" in "relative") as the proper platform for large installation of Rails. Call it "RoRoR" or "Rails on RHEL". Just adding my $.02 to help the marketing folks out. (Or just being silly.) Seriously, I will continue to refer to RHEL -- especially when googling (another "inappropriation", to coin a phrase, of a trademark, no?) for arcane solutions to RHEL-specific issues.
Red Hat's war on RHEL - rhel6
Posted Mar 7, 2008 21:04 UTC (Fri) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]
LOL ... maybe Except that all sort of other domains with rhel exist, such as rhel.com (which is for sale for $4k+! My intentions are benign, and I think anyone reasonable at Red Hat would see that. If they did make a request of me, I would probably comply.
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 9, 2008 17:05 UTC (Sun) by djreedps (guest, #50980) [Link]
I'm almost certain that Hormel would rather not have people use the name Spam which they trademarked for their delicious lunch meat product to refer to horrible, unwanted, unsolicited emails. I bet that Curad would rather not have people call bandages Band-aids. And that Puffs tissue would rather not have people call facial tissues Kleenex. But that is how people call things. So Red Hat can either accept the fact that their product will always be commonly named RHEL and there is nothing they can do to change that, or else they can rename RedHat Enterprise Linux to something else. This isn't the first time a company has either had its product misnamed, had the common name given as its competitor's brand name, or else had its trademark misused, and it won't be the last.
URL
Posted Mar 18, 2008 18:04 UTC (Tue) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link]
The URL of that page has /tips-and-tricks-rhel-ref/ in its path.I'm sure this was just an attempt at parody, not to be taken seriously. A good laugh at the expense of users of the JavaTM Programming Language.
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 20, 2008 11:01 UTC (Thu) by martin.marcher (guest, #47489) [Link]
Someone should tell the writer of the source that RHEL isn't correct if s/he want's to refer to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Have a good look at the link (note the last but one word): http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/02/04/tips-and-tricks-...