Kernel Traffic #325 For 5 Sep 2005

Things in SATA-land have been moving along recently, so I updated the software status report:

http://linux.yyz.us/sata/software-status.html

Although I have not updated it in several weeks, folks may wish to refer to the hardware status report as well:

http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html

Thanks to all the hard-working SATA contributors!

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc6/2.6.13-rc6-mm1/

• Lots of fixes, updates and cleanups all over the place.
• If you have the right debugging options set, this kernel will generate a storm of sleeping-in-atomic-code warnings at boot, from the scsi code. It is being worked on.

Linux being a registered trademark is old news.

Linus clarified the whole "Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds" thing back in 2000 in a lengthy email to LKML.

He explained both why Linux was registered as a trademark, why he has to enforce/police it to keep it, and what the groundrules regarding its use are (and don't worry, it's all quite sensible).

You can find the email here : http://boudicca.tux.org/hypermail/linux-kernel/2000week04/0654.html

Gaah. I don't tend to bother about slashdot, because quite frankly, the whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not.

[ And don't get me wrong - I follow slashdot too, exactly because it's fun to see people argue. I'm not complaining ;]

And I don't tend to worry about the Inquirer and the Register, because both of them are all about being rough and saying things in ways that might not be acceptable in other places, and that's what makes them fun to read. So when they then write something nasty about Linux (or me), hey, it goes with the territory.

But I was really hoping this particular wanking session wouldn't overflow into Linux-kernel.

Anyway, the posting Jesper points to is a fine one. Partly to show that this trademark thing sure as hell isn't anything new, and partly because the rules really haven't changed.

So let's repeat that link again, just as background,

http://boudicca.tux.org/hypermail/linux-kernel/2000week04/0654.html

and then people should think a bit (and maybe research) what a trademark really means.

A trademark exists to set up some rules about using a "mark" (name, logo, you name it) in trade. The people who pay to license (or get a unique trademark of their own) a certain name do so because they care about that particular name. People who don't care, don't pay. It's really that easy. It's about getting legal protection for a particular name.

For example, this means that a _user_ would never pay a single cent over a trademark. I don't know why/how the Inq even came to that "companies to pay for using free software" idea. It shows a total lack of understanding about what a trademark is in the first place.

Now, a company that has a company name usually _does_ want to protect their name. Not always, but it's kind of embarrassing (and easily an expensive and big bother) if somebody else trademarks that name, and then sends a cease-and-desist order to you and forces you to switch to something else.

So you'll find that most commerical entities protect their name some way, regardless of _what_ that name is. For example, let's say that you called your company or distribution "Lipro", then you'd like to trademark that. Goodie. It's pretty expensive, but most companies feel that it's more than worth it to know that you've got exclusive rights to that name, and nobody else can force you to change,

So the first point here is that regardless of you call your Linux distribution "Linux Something" or something totally different, you'll want to protect that name if you are serious about making a big commercial distribution. Exactly because you do _not_ want to be in the situation that somebody else hijacks your name from you.

Now, you can do that protection two different ways: you can make up a unique name of your own ("Red Hat" or "Linspire" or "Debian" or whatever), and trademark that. Then the trademark office keeps track of things, and guarantees that there are no clashes (within your business area).

Or, alternatively, you can ask somebody else who already has a unique name if they might "sublicense" their name in combination with something else. In the case of "Linux", that name is already guaranteed unique by the trademark office, so let's say that you felt that you wanted to have a unique name that contained that, you'd approach LMI and say "I want to call my magazine LinuxJournal, can you write up paperwork that makes sure that nobody else can do so"?

And let's repeat: somebody who doesn't want to _protect_ that name would never do this. You can call anything "MyLinux", but the downside is that you may have somebody else who _did_ protect himself come along and send you a cease-and-desist letter. Or, if the name ends up showing up in a trademark search that LMI needs to do every once in a while just to protect the trademark (another legal requirement for trademarks), LMI itself might have to send you a cease-and-desist-or-sublicense it letter.

At which point you either rename it to something else, or you sublicense it. See? It's all about whether _you_ need the protection or not, not about whether LMI wants the money or not.

As to the "cease-and-desist or sublicense the mark" letters, they are sadly directly brought on by the requirements of maintaining a trademark. If you have a trademark, you have to police it, which means that you have to do trademark searches to see who uses it in a commercial setting, and make sure that they use it properly.

So to answer a particular question that came up here on Linux-kernel: "Does the linuxjournal.com pay $5000?".

First off, I don't know where the $5000 came from - it's different for different classes of people. Secondly, LinuxJournal was one of the companies that raised the money to get the "Linux" trademark in the first place! As a result, they don't pay a red cent, because they had been part of protecting the name in the first place. And yes, they paid real lawyers to do so. Their sublicense got "grandfathered in".

Finally, just to make it clear: not only do I not get a cent of the trademark money, but even LMI (who actually administers the mark) has so far historically always lost money on it. That's not a way to sustain a trademark, so they're trying to at least become self-sufficient, but so far I can tell that lawyers fees to _give_ that protection that commercial companies want have been higher than the license fees. Even pro bono lawyers chanrge for the time of their costs and paralegals etc.

Linux International has paid for it, maddog has worked on it on his own time, and various companies have helped chip in (like the original companies and people who got the trademark in the first place).

Yes, it's a poor situation. That driver seems to have quite a few problems.

I was hoping that by now we could simply deprecate smbfs and tell people to use CIFS, but I'm not sure that CIFS is ready for that yet.

Steve, what's your take? Does CIFS offer a 100% superset of smbfs capabilities?

OK - good progress on filling the requirement for Windows ME/9x support which seems to be the most common reason for still needing smbfs based on various email responses on this thread (if we can get this work finished up fast, it will avoid some double maintainence).

CIFS (in the cifs.git tree) can now handle not just mounts to Windows ME (and probably Windows 9x), but readdir and enough of lookup. Finishing up the remainder should go fast (OpenX instead of NTCreateX is the main piece left).

Of course finding Windows 95, Windows 98, and OS/2 servers is a little harder than it sounds...although scripting a subset of the functional tests that should work should be pretty easy.

I will also put a version of the source that will compile at least as far back as 2.6.9 up on the project page within a few days.

ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.13-rc6/2.6.13-rc6-mm2/

• Various updates. Nothing terribly noteworthy.
• This kernel still spits a bunch of scheduling-while-atomic warnings from the scsi code. Please ignore.