By Jo Best, 30 January 2004 15:25
NEWS Lindows, the open-source operator that has been battling with the Redmond über-software company over trademark infringement, has lost its legal battle in the Netherlands.
After a similar defeat in Sweden, the Dutch courts have ruled that Lindows has to stop using its Windows-spoofing name. And the legal authorities in Luxembourg and Belgium are firmly in agreement, after it was found to be in violation of a Benelux law on brand names.
The name itself isn't the only issue for the open-source company - it's no longer allowed to sell or advertise its products, has to cancel all outstanding orders and can't allow users from the Netherlands, Luxembourg or Belgium to access its site.
Lindows.com has today announced that while it will abide by the terms of the ruling for the moment, it intends to appeal the decision.
The battle over its name doesn't seem to be hampering Lindows, however. The company is ramping up for the continuation of a similar trademark fight in the US courts, which is scheduled to begin on 1 March this year, and in which Microsoft has so far been beaten twice. Lindows also has plans to get its LindowsLive operating system onto more PCs this year - by distributing it for free over P2P networks.
Comments
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1. Jerald
all this does is turn a hostile Linux community that once spurned Lindows - to championing the lindows cause - which to my mind is a good thing.. Lindows may be agressive in it's marketing but someone has to be the break down the doors of the might Microsoft empire. The scandinavian judges probably speak English as their 2nd or 3rd language so to them of course they sound the same... doh!
2. Warren
What a patronising load of twaddle from Jelard ;0) Most Swedes I know speak better English than the natives. And is this really going to make Linux bigots hate Microsoft that little bit more. I doubt it, they've already turned the dial up full to number eleven - it can't go any higher.
3. Joe Whitehead
You're talking about something that resembles an election. While 20% may prefer one canidate, and 30% another, the one with 20% can win because the other 50% of voters are swayed. (;
I don't mind Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc. But I won't be upgrading to XP/ME/2003 on any of my machines, either. heh I'm someone who grew up with old 6502-based systems that barely even had a kernel, so the idea of MS trying to lock out BIOSes (read other news), is really disturbing. It seems that the BIOS should be just that - A _basic_ IO system, as in it just gets the bootstrapper loaded, so the OS can decide how things work. It should be possible to reduce the BIOS to a 16KB of the lower 1MB, but MS is probally trying to make it so that newer systems waste tons of convential memory on that (like 128KB or more), or making the BIOS not work in 'pure' real mode, so they can sabotage old OSes.
I know for a fact that most BIOSes now have 64KB of convential memory, and upto 1MB of 32bit memory used for the actually code. (; I'm sure that the 'better' BIOSes will not work with real mode kernels like DOS. I also bet that you will need a cryptokey, just to get your boot code loaded. );
You can bet that MS will make it like VXDs in old windows 3.1 days - You'll need permission just to write an OS (cause you'll need to call BIOS functions). Imagine if they make thousands of new undocumented (or licensed) functions. That alone would severely help MS cut the throats of others' OSes.