[Gllug] Linuxemporium - Pink Tie

[Dave Cridland [Home]]

On Wed, 20 Nov 2002 14:39:12 +0000
Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:

> At 12:16 +0000 2002-11-20, Andrew Halliwell wrote:
> >  > What has happened to the 10 quid "Red Hat" Linux sets from Linuxemporium?
> >
> >Pink Tie *IS* Red Hat.
> >They just got a bit stroppy recently about third party sellers using their
> >tradename, and asked people to use something else. And not use any of the
> >Red Hat logos in the distro (so they needed a bit of a search and destroy
> >before being sellable).
> 
> I email John Winters (Linuxemporium), who said that Pink Tie is fully 
> Open Source Red Hat.
> 
> In other words, Red Hat cannot be copied.

No, it can. However, even though it's permissable under the GPL, it's
not permissable under trademark law to *sell* that copy. There's other
software with similar restrictions, and even though it somewhat confused
me at first, it's fair enough really. So the software can be copied, but
the name cannot. That would become passing off, which could leave RedHat
wide open to serious abuse.

CUPS is another example, for instance. I'm not even sure if you *can*
sell CUPS and still call it CUPS.

Dave.

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