[LWN Logo]

To: corbet@eklektix.com
Subject: Amazon and Red Hat products
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 1999 12:27:04 -0400
From: Melissa London <melissa@redhat.com>

Bob Young asked me to forward this:

Re: Amazon's concerns over fake Red Hat products.

Red Hat received a call last week from Amazon.com.  They were getting 
complaints from Amazon customers who had purchased products through 
Amazon's auction site from sellers they believed to be selling
products from Red Hat Inc.  These products turned out to be CD-ROMS 
that consisted of free ftp downloads of Red Hat Linux, produced by 
independent vendors.

In order to avoid confusion and to protect our trademarks we 
explained our trademark policies to the Amazon staff.  This is simply 
that you may download and resell Red Hat Linux.  You should not, 
however, attempt intentionally or otherwise, to confuse buyers into 
thinking they were buying Official Red Hat Inc. products.

So we request that independent vendors call their product 
something other than Red Hat, and not use our trademarks or logos.  
They may -describe- their product as containing Red Hat Linux, but 
the product itself must have another name.

All of the reputable vendors of low-cost CD-ROMS that contain free 
ftp downloaded versions of Red Hat Linux follow this policy without 
our even requesting it.  The current problem has arisen because of the large 
number of new, sometimes-less-than reputable suppliers who are using retail 
outlets like Amazon.com's auction site to trick customers into 
believing they were getting Official Red Hat Linux from Red Hat Inc. 
at a bargain price when in fact they were getting a cheap knock-off 
product.

Red Hat depends on the open source software development model, and 
our customers rely on Red Hat Inc. to supply the benefits of this 
open source model to them.  For this reason we publish every line of 
code we write under open source licenses, in effect we do not own any 
proprietary software.  But we do own our trademarks.  

The purpose of trademark law is to enable vendors to identify their 
products for their customers.  If anyone could call their ketchup 
"Heinz Ketchup" consumers would have no idea when they were buying 
the product from the Heinz company, and when they were buying a cheap 
knock-off.

The way trademark law works is that if you do not police your 
trademarks, if you allow anyone to use those trademarks without 
permission, then you will eventually lose control over those 
trademarks.   So we  grant permission to use our trademarked 
names generously to those who ask permission, and we 
will continue to insist that others do not use our trademarks 
without permission or in ways that confuse our customers and the 
marketplace.

This is the problem that Amazon.com wanted us to help them address 
for their customers.  And it is the reason we will continue to enforce 
our trademarks whenever and wherever anyone attempts to 
infringe on them.

Cheers,    Bob.


ps.  The term Red Hat Linux GPL is neither a sanctioned term by Red 
Hat, nor is it accurate - a significant amount of the code in Red Hat 
Linux is licensed under BSD, Artistic, X, NPL, and other open source 
licenses.