Linux founder Linus Torvalds is defending protection of the Linux trademark and insists that sublicensing is a loss-making operation. He explained that the "cease-and-desist or sublicense the mark" letters are a requirement of maintaining a trademark. "Not only do I not get a cent of the trademark money, but even the Linux Mark Institute has so far historically always lost money on it."
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Member since:2005-06-30
There is no unity among "Linux enthusiasts" to destroy. It's just a mechanism of obtaining ad impressions, not some concerted effort to "wedge" people. Linus might not be profiting from the trademark licensing, but that certainly isn't going to stop others from trying.
Member since:2005-07-02
Well, whether or not there is unity (even tenuous) between Linux enthusiasts doesn't really matter, as long as there is a perceived one - and there is such a perceived unity among anti-Linux posters.
Your point about generating ad impression misses the mark, since there's no incentive for this among readers posting comments. In other words, though it may be conceivable that OSNews editors choose sensitive topics to generate page views (and thus ad impressions), readers posting FUD don't care about page hits - what they want is for Linux users to get bogged down in sterile in-fighting. This is especially true of astroturfers.
Unless you're speculating that OSNews employees post inflammatory comments in order to sustain flame wars...something which I'm not ready to believe in, sorry.
Member since:
2005-07-02
The fools that jumped all over Linus knew what they were doing: trying to use this as a "wedge" issue to sow conflict and disunity among Linux enthusiasts. I wouldn't be surprised if a good number of them were astroturfers.