On Sat, Sep 25, 2004 at 07:56:38PM -0400, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
<snip>
> So far, Red Hat is the only company who's products have been freely
> redistributed enough for this to come to a legal matter, where entities
> challenged the USPTO to begin looking at Red Hat's trademark as such.
>
> Hence the reason for the name change from Red Hat Linux. Red Hat was
> already trying to figure out how it could please its own maintainers,
> and the whole shabang occurred at the same time.
>
Additionally, retailers like CheapBytes were forced by Red Hat to change
the name of their distros to things like "Pink Tie" to protect Red Hat's
trademark. As a publicly traded company, Red Hat now had to protect its
IP to protect the investment of its shareholders. This also limited Red
Hat's exposure on support issues; they couldn't afford to provide
support to thousands of users who bought cheap CD copies of their distro
through outlets like this.
Paul
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