How does this affect the trademark game?

Posted Jul 24, 2003 8:49 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

I wonder whether Red Hat will change the way it enforces its trademark on the basic distribution (despite the recent further tightening). After all, they were trying very hard to ensure that their identity was only stamped on official boxed sets bought from (and supported by) them. Since these official boxed sets will no longer exist, does this mean that the cheap CD duplicators will be allowed to sell "Red Hat Linux" again?

Sure, I suspect the answer is no, but I'm just vaguely curious as to how this all fits together.

I was wondering this. But the Red Hat FAQ says:

Q: Can I redistribute Red Hat Linux?

A: Yes, either on a non-commercial basis, as described in our the Red Hat Trademark Guidelines, or on a commercial basis with an explicit trademark license with Red Hat, or on any basis with all Red Hat trademarks removed.

(My emphasis).

That reads to me as though the existing Cheapbytes / Cheep Linux (etc) as-cheap-as-possible distributions will continue to be expected to rebrand the product, but there would be room for a Linux distributor to make a commercial agreement with Red Hat to provide "third-party Red Hat Linux" CD-based distributions available.

Now that there isn't an official Red Hat boxed set for them to compete against, I would imagine that Red Hat would be open to any suggestions that were basically good for Free Software and provided another source of income for Red Hat.

James

Posted Jul 24, 2003 16:13 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I would guess that the answer is no also. The problem is that the law makes it the owners problem to strictly enforce their trademark or lose it. You can lose it if you find out that someone has a vaguely similar looking image but you didnt send a pack of lawyers on them as soon as possible.