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Red Hat's war on RHEL
Red Hat's war on RHEL
Posted Mar 6, 2008 17:37 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)Parent article: Red Hat's war on RHEL
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.
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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.