Members of the Linux community are dismissing a legal injunction brought against SuSE Linux by a German court on Tuesday as frivolous, but fear its implications for Linux distributors.
"It's bloody stupid," said Everything Linux director, Anthony Rumble. "It's all over an obsolete link left on [SuSE] desktops."
The link is associated with an application that has been removed from the SuSE distribution called Krayon. The plaintiff is believed to hold the right to use the English version of the word, Crayon, as a trademark.
In Germany it is legal to register generic words chosen from foreign vocabularies as trademarks.
"I can't believe a judge could impose a restriction on a company for something like this," he added.
Dr. Richard Piper, who has worked with SuSE Linux to implement a patient information database for the Royal North Shore Hospital's (RNSH) intensive care unit is sceptical about the litigation, but less incredulous than Rumble.
"It sounds there like there's no substance to it," he said, referring to the open source community's prior experience with the German legal fraternity.
Early in 2001, Linux Web communities and news portals were dominated by news that Adobe had taken legal action against a group of students within the German jurisdiction for using the word 'Illustrator' in the title of a graphics application it had developed for KDE, called K-illustrator.
The situation turned into a Public Relations nightmare for Adobe. It was revealed that the German legal system allows its lawyers to seek out profitable litigation independently, and entice clients to become plaintiffs with financial rewards.
The legal injunction is highly unlikely to have any impact on the RNSH's patient information service, in part due to the nature of Linux open source software development, but also due to its limited jurisdiction.
"If SuSE stopped producing Linux tomorrow I could run the software on another distribution without making any modifications to it at all," said Piper praising the logic of open source software development.
The chances of this scenario ever eventuating are extremely low. The trademark restrictions substantiating the plaintiff's claims only apply in Germany.
International distribution of SuSE Linux should continue unhindered, but Piper is uncomfortable with the implications of the case for open source software developers.
Piper, an open source proponent, says that developers like SuSE are in the business of selling open source in a convenient packages that make it possible to implement projects like those he administers at the RNSH in a cost effective manner.
"It would be tragic in a cultural sense if silly litigation affected their business," he said. "They make a good product but their [SuSE Linux] finances aren't up to litigation."
