Trademarks, yadda, yadda, yadda. I believe it's perfectly reasonable for RedHat to
protect it's brand by not letting people sell CDs with their name on it. Their reputation, and, therefore, the product with their name on it, needs to be under their control if they are going to be successful in building a business—especially the value-added-version-of-a-commodity business. (I paid $200 for a "pro" version of RedHat with CDs and documentation mostly because I trusted the name [and I didn't want to bother with downloading it and burning a CD].) The author of this InfoAnarchy piece on the subject seems to agree with that ("I believe that, unless the GPL is found to already allow use of the trademark, Red Hat has a legitimate case here."), but also says, "That trademark violations should, by default, only be committable by profit-oriented companies." It is a common argument that non-for-profit projects aren't subject to intellectual property laws. But it's naive and causes all kinds of problems. With regard to trademarks and software, here's a hypothetical example: Instead of calling this open-source graphics program, The Gimp, they could call it Adobe Photoshop for Unix. This would not only be obviously unfair to Adobe, who has made the name Photoshop mean the best in graphics software, over years of work and millions in development cost, it would also be extremely confusing for customers—especially when you consider there could be a dozen products with the same name of completely varying quality.
protect it's brand by not letting people sell CDs with their name on it. Their reputation, and, therefore, the product with their name on it, needs to be under their control if they are going to be successful in building a business—especially the value-added-version-of-a-commodity business. (I paid $200 for a "pro" version of RedHat with CDs and documentation mostly because I trusted the name [and I didn't want to bother with downloading it and burning a CD].) The author of this InfoAnarchy piece on the subject seems to agree with that ("I believe that, unless the GPL is found to already allow use of the trademark, Red Hat has a legitimate case here."), but also says, "That trademark violations should, by default, only be committable by profit-oriented companies." It is a common argument that non-for-profit projects aren't subject to intellectual property laws. But it's naive and causes all kinds of problems. With regard to trademarks and software, here's a hypothetical example: Instead of calling this open-source graphics program, The Gimp, they could call it Adobe Photoshop for Unix. This would not only be obviously unfair to Adobe, who has made the name Photoshop mean the best in graphics software, over years of work and millions in development cost, it would also be extremely confusing for customers—especially when you consider there could be a dozen products with the same name of completely varying quality.