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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"Trademark" is the key word. If RedHad permits things out into the market with their trademarks all over them that they did not sell, then they are at risk of losing their trademark. Remember the primary purpose of a trademark is to identify your products as yours, and not let anyone else identify their products as yours.

It's a contradiction in legal terms to have a trademark that is open source and anyone can use, and legal system's resolution is to declare your trademark isn't a trademark after all.

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You are misinterpreting what I said. I'm not talking about someone else impersonating RHEL. Canonical has no issue with its OS out in the market. RHEL could just be free to use (with updates but without other support) if they choose. This is how it used to be before it became RHEL anyway. Hence, CentOS was created as an outsider effort. Nowadays, CentOS is half inside RH, which is why the distinction is a bit silly.

However, upon thinking a bit more, their current strategy still makes business sense since RHEL and CentOS are silos. While the sets of users that pay for support and the ones that don't are different, if they started giving updates for free, it reduces their bargaining power in general and more so when time comes to renew support. Right now, if you stop paying for support, you cannot use RHEL any more and it won't get updates.

"RHEL could just be free to use (with updates but without other support) if they choose."

But not with that name.

Centos is as close as it can get.

I don't see the argument. Trademark has nothing to do with money. They don't lose their trademark if they give away something gratis. Canonical doesn't lose their trademarks just because you can get Ubuntu without paying them. Before RHEL, there was Red Hat Linux which was free to use.

That is so very incorrect. Way back in the beginning, they offered RHEL without support but with updates. At some point they started charging for access and eventually they raised the prices high enough that I couldn't afford to use it any more.

Google is free to use, that doesn't mean that just anybody can take their trademark.

Trademarks have nothing to do with whether something is traded for money or not.

Red Hat bought out CentOS now. They own CentOS. There would be no trademark dillution from a legal standpoint if they used their own trademark for their free version of the distro.

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