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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

>> Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds

I hadn't realized that before. The link below discusses the reasons why this was done.

https://www.linux.com/news/linux-mark-institute-protecting-l...

It's because some douchebag named William Della Croce Jr. claimed the trademark for Linux and tried hustling people (book/CD publishers and such) for the rights to use it without being the actual author of Linux. A judge eventually awarded the mark to Linus himself and since then he's been vigorously defending it to ensure this malarkey doesn't happen again.

Relevant info on wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mark_Institute

Fascinating. So he’s basically the BDFL of the name by making sure one person (him) can police its use.

Leaving it some entity like the Linux Foundation likely would have been much much worse.

"As a CEO of Linux Foundation, I too deserve a competitive compensation package, like the CEO of Mozilla Foundation."

Is this a real quote ?

No, just an extrapolation.

Why would that be worse ?

"Design by committee" is a great way to create something that works for a lot of people, but is average at best. If you want to create something that really excels, you need someone to drive home the vision and that's really hard to do when you're more than one, because it's really hard to be 100% on the same page.

Not to say it's impossible, it's just a lot harder.

It's the same principle as with the largely family-owned German Mittelstand - so many of these companies are "hidden champions" are where they are because their leadership / ownership doesn't have to bow to the will of some obscure "committee", but can do what they feel is right for the company and will ensure its long-term success.

In contrast, transferring the trademark to a committee-run foundation (or to go into economy analogy again, a company that's traded on the stock market), the incentives for those in control can drift: short-term profit wins over long-term interests (e.g. trust of the public). We've seen way too many organizations in the FOSS world fall victim to that, most notably Mozilla and MySQL - the former is always embroiled into some sort of scandal and Firefox usage has fallen through the floor, the latter was mismanaged by Sun and eventually Oracle so hard that its co-founder was forced to fork off the codebase.

Then don't we just take the source code (which we have the legal right to) and make some other Linux?

You can do that any time you want, but enough deviation from the mainline kernel tree and you're no longer allowed to call it Linux.

Apart from the “design by committee” argument, the Linux Foundation seems to be ... slightly evil, with so many WEF members filling up its ranks.

What is a WEF member?

A member of the WEF, naturally.

https://www.weforum.org/communities/forum-members

More like the other way around, the courts appointed him owner of the trademark because he's the bdfl.

They once made commercial entities with Linux in the name rename themselves, while leaving distros and nonprofits.

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