(should this discussion be taken elsewhere, since i'd like to continue it just a while longer -- i have a vested interest in knowing *exactly* what is being protected by RH's trademark.) as a professional courseware developer and corporate trainer, i'm still confused by what is and is not protected by RH. case in point -- a few years ago, i mentioned to a red hat employee that i was designing a course called "red hat system administration", that i was going to offer to some of my current clients who were interested. his response was to *immediately* tell me that that would be a violation of red hat's trademark -- to have the name "red hat" in the title of the course. i'm not sure i see how else i could name the course -- if it's designed to teach people specifically how to administer a red hat system, what *else* could i call it? more to the point, is it a violation to, say, write a book that teaches how to use red hat linux? there are hundreds of books out there with the name "red hat" in the title -- did all of these authors have to get red hat's permission to use their name. i doubt it. unfortunately, i think red hat has established a confusing, contradictory set of rules (see my previous posting, which goes into some of that detail). while protecting one's trademark is a standard part of business these days, it's clear that no one really thought hard enough about the implications of applying a trademark to an entirely GPL-ed product, which by the license is *designed* to be freely available. and that goes back to a previous question of mine -- if everything in a red hat distro is GPLed, and the GPL *explicitly* states that i can distribute it at my leisure, or even charge for it if i want, and if i choose to do this with a red hat distribution, what exactly am i allowed to call it? not only does red hat suggest it can't be called "red hat", but i've seen where they also suggest it can't even be named something similar, like "pink hat" or "red fedora", or whatever. frankly, i think red hat needs to think on this a bit longer, unless there's something here i'm missing. rday
