[luau] There Won't Be RH 10?

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

The news report is still very confusing (to me anyway), but it appears 
that there won't be RedHat 10:

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/09/22/1712227.shtml?tid=106&tid=110&tid=185&tid=187

Instead, consumers will have Federa 1.x, and business users RedHat 
Enterprise 3.

I had been wondering how RedHat could support its market cap of almost 2 
billion dollars if it continues its current way of doing business.   
Such a move (if my reading of the aformentioned event is correct) is 
indeed not only logical, but also inevitable.  Supporting the consumer 
version of Linux takes extremely large amounts of effort, but has a very 
low profit margin, if at all.  RedHat certainly has grown to the level 
where it no longer has to count on selling the retail packages for revenues.

But a much bigger issue is about the Red Hat trademark.  Because RedHat 
Linux is GPL'd, RedHat cannot stop other from repackaging, indeed RedHat 
encourages others to repackage, RedHat Linux.  This then runs into the 
trademark problem.  RedHat considers its trademark its most important 
asset.  If RedHat continues to distribute the consumer version of RedHat 
Linux, sooner or later RedHat will have to come to bridge of having to 
sue those third party re-packagers.  Otherwise, as a matter of law (for 
lack of due diligence in enforcement), RedHat will lose its trademark 
right. (Has anyone ever wondered why we can freely use the name 
"Aspirin", but not "Tylenol"?)

First we had Mozilla/Netscape, then OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.  Now we 
have RedHat/Fedora.  Linux is evolving, not only technologically, but in 
terms of the way of doing sustainable business.