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Re: [ox-en] Patents and Copyright, but what about other Exclusive Property Rights/Trademarks? (Was: RedHat and Fedora and SuSE and Novell)



On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Martin Hardie wrote:

On Friday 07 November 2003 00:14, Graham Seaman wrote:
 If I join
someone's project, I don't expect to remove their name from code;
similarly with Fedora
1.  thus it is clear that is the project OWNED by Fedora - business making 
money out of your labour
2. but if I become part of their unpaid labour force and then decide I want to 
adopt their code and build upon it I cannot call it anything like Fedora (or 
amybe even Dog House.....)

Are these not restrictions on"information that wants to be free"? 

Linus owns the Linux trademark, doesn't he? Is that a problem? I don't
understand your objection. 'Fedora' is a name, and is as free (or not) as
any other name. If I want to redistribute the Fedora stuff in a slightly
different Fedora, I can't give it their name; just like they can't give it
mine. (I know there are abuses of trademark where eg. McDonalds claim that
they own invidual's names, but I don't think that's what we're discussing
here).  


Are they not ways for capital to capture the labour of the dare I call it the 
"multitude" (insert here what name you want to give the labouring masses) - 
does it not place a restiction on what people can do witht heir 
labour/product of their labour time? Does it not capture the fruits of  a 
person's labour and turn it into a commodity for exchange - the thing called 
Fedora or Red Hat?

As I understand it, you could take the Fedora distribution, remove all the
Fedora images, remove all text references to Fedora, and rebrand it as the
'Martin Hardie' distribution, perfectly within your legal rights. Just as 
long as you don't touch the copyright statements.

Trademarks are not the problem.


How can people say one form of closedness is bad and one good??? What is the 
basis for erecting these (artificial) divisions amongst forms of exclusive 
property rights? Or does freedom only exist for "coders" and "hackers" in the 
brave new world and thus openess only really matters when it comes to the 
strict code?

IMO the problems with commercial Linux distributions (eg. SUSE, RedHat)
are not legal but technical - tweaking the contents or distribution
systems so it takes more than the necessary work to switch from them to
someone else, etc. Which is not only a problem for coders, but also
end-users: go too far down the RedHat/SUSE road, and they may find they
are as little enabled by running Linux as they were by running M$. 

Use Debian.

Graham

Just wanting to put these things onthe table

Martin

 


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