Tuesday, May 1, 2007

More on the Red Hat / Hibernate trademark hubbub

Follow up to this post. Just found Bill Dudney's post regarding the adverse reaction to Red Hat's trademark enforcement. Bill offers an excellent analysis on why the open source community reacted as it did. He also argues that "RedHat is not evil for enforcing their trademarks." Hear hear!

Again, they have every right to enforce the use of their trademarks. I’m not arguing against that at all. The issue is ownership. It is one company (and only one company) that owns the trademark. The thousands of developers that invested in groking Hibernate, JBoss etc have zero ownership in that trademark. They can’t do anything with the mark that is not allowed by the owner or law. So from my current understanding I could offer ‘Training for the Hibernate Implementation of JPA’. Some might ask, well is that so onerous to you? Is it that much trouble to put the extra verbiage into the marketing stuff? No its not, and you can bet if I ever publicly offer anything related to Hibernate or JBoss I will be putting that verbiage in.
Side note: be sure to check out the link to Simon Phipps' presentation on The Zen of Open.

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