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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : Mark Newton <newton@atdot.dotat.org>
  Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 01:08:32 +1030

Re: Werner Icking bicycle accident

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 08:17:18AM +1030, Mark Newton wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 05:52:01PM +1030, Alan Kennington wrote:
> 
>  > Someone might then buy the copyright to linus' work from the
>  > heirs for a large sum of money, and they might try to make
>  > really big trouble!
> 
> They can do that.  They can't affect existing GPL license grants, though,
> so the net effect of that would be zero (so the code would fork into
> "costs dollars" and "free", and the free one would continue in exactly the
> way it's working now, and the "costs dollars" one wouldn't get used by
> anyone).
> 
>  > In fact, I would say that this would be very likely indeed.
> 
> Do you have some kind of reason for thinking that, or are you just making
> this all up?

Mark,

Well, I know that this has appeared briefly in slashdot also, but....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/16928.html

This article is exactly the kind of "give me back my trademark"
thing that I was thinking of.
And Ylönen isn't even dead yet.
Now I know that there are differences between the SSH situation
and the linux situation, but there is some points of similarity here too.

If you transpose the SSH story a bit, I could envisage the heirs of
Linus (after the shark attack) 4 years afterwards suing the
perpetrators of FreeLinux for using the Linux trademark and
harming the shareholder value of the Linux Software Corporation Inc.

So, no, I was not just making this up for light entertainment.
And by a curious coincidence, Ylönen is apparently a Finn!
The parallels are eerie.
Just run the clock forward to 5 years after the shark, and
there you have it.
It might make a good movie...
A shark, ideological warfare, California swimming pools,
corporate intrigue.....
Well now I'm starting to make it up.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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