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The Happy Dinosaur

Red Hat prospered because it stayed close to the ground, identifying closely with the rapidly growing user and developer communities, and because it had a brand that was instantly recognisable. The raising of Red Hat's profile meant that, by the time Linux began to take off in commercial environments at the end of the decade, Red Hat was perfectly positioned to take advantage and become THE Linux company at least in the eyes of the market in which it chose to operate. Much of this success was due to the name and the shadow man logo which uniquely identify Red Hat (and led to the humorous representation of the "shadow man" as The Happy Dinosaur).

Red Hat's business model is built around generating revenue by selling subscriptions, installation, training, support, upgrades and maintenance for the software it markets under its name, and if the services aren't up to scratch, the software can always be downloaded for free and the services found elsewhere. A logical corollary of this effect is that commercial "open source" software projects are more responsive to the demands of users and developers, because they have to be. At a commercial level you know the service you are getting by the name of the company. Red Hat does not own the product it sells, and relies entirely for its business on its good name and its identity represented by its logo.

Trademarks, like other government granted monopolies, have their downsides. The upside is that we know that we, as end users, have some assurance that the version of Red Hat or Ubuntu or Fedora that we download has come from the original source, and is not a maverick remake. The justification for free and open source software projects and companies to employ trademark law is to protect themselves against being ripped off by cowboys and imposters. There is nothing to stop Microsoft, for instance, packaging and re-distributing a version of GNU/Linux, but it cannot market that version of Linux as Red Hat or Ubuntu, or use the Shadow Man as its logo. To this extent, trademarks serve a simple and useful purpose. Their useful role is to protect the user and distributor from pretenders and predators, and protect the integrity of the mark. Or as Joe Brockmeier puts it: "When used properly, like copyright, trademarks are a handy tool to protect and promote open source projects."

The same strange idea

Conversely, improper use of trademarks has been a considerable hindrance to many free and open source software projects. As early as 15 August, 1994, William R Della Croce Jr from Boston, Massachusetts filed for the US rights to the Linux trademark despite having no known association with Linux or any Linux company. The first that anyone knew about Della Croce and his ownership of the trademark was in March 1995, when Yggdrasil Computing filed for a trademark on The Linux Bible, and had it rejected on the grounds that the Linux trademark was the sole property of William R Della Croce. During the following year Yggdrasil, Linux Journal and others received demands from Della Croce for payment of 25 per cent of royalties on products that used the name, Linux, informing them that:

LINUX ® is proprietary. Information about obtaining approval for use and/or making payment for past use may be obtained by writing to the following address...

Yggdrasil was able to show that Linux was in common use long before Della Croce made his first application for the trademark. The legal dispute was finally resolved at considerable cost in August 1997, and the Linux trademark within the USA was assigned to Linus Torvalds as part of the settlement.

Jon 'maddog' Hall Meanwhile, according to Jon 'maddog' Hall, "all around the world people were getting the same strange idea." Free software advocates and developers "can't afford to go to the 200 countries around the world and buy trademarks, and maintain them, so we have to fight them on a case by case basis." Each time this has happened maddog has had to contact the patent lawyers in the appropriate country, and "pay another $10,000, just to wrest that trademark back into Linus' hands, so that anyone who wants to can use it. This is just an astronomical waste of time. We live in an electronic age where anybody can have a wonderful idea, trademark it, and hope to make money" whether or not they had any part in the original concept.

To solve this problem maddog founded the Linux Mark Institute (now part of the Linux Foundation) in 2005, with support from Linus Torvalds, with the objective of protecting the Linux mark for the community and against the prospectors of the future. The Linux Mark Institute requires that any company that trades off the name registers with the Institute and makes a small donation towards the defence of the trademark.

Next: Unix, paint thinner

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