Linus defends trademarking Linux

Earlier this week we said here that a lawyer acting on behalf of Torvalds had written to 90 companies in Australia and asked them to relinquish any legal claim to the name Linux and to purchase a license from the Linux Mark Institute: a nonprofit organization that is the licensee for the Linux trademark.

Under the deal, companies will pay between $200 and $5,000 to sublicense the Linux trademark. On the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds denied claims that he or anyone else is making money from sublicensing the Linux trademark, which was mostly spent on lawyers.

He said that he didn't get a cent of the trademark money and the Linux Mark Institute actually lost money on the idea. The only reason that the Institute was bothering with the "cease-and-desist” letters was because it's required that a company defend its trademark.

However Torvalds didn't answer any of the other complaints from the open source industry that it was hypocritical to defend a trademark while at the same time having a go at software patents.

On the plus side, Torvalds did say he liked the Inquirer: "all about being rough and saying things in ways that might not be acceptable in other places, and that's what makes it fun to read. So when they then write something nasty about Linux (or me), hey, it goes with the territory." µ