Flutterby™! :

John Deamer forwarded me this message:

A group calling itself the Linux Standards Association has set up shop to cash in on the Linux phenomenon [3]. At first it appeared that no-one known to the Linux community was involved in the effort, but it developed that one Michael McLagna is behind it. McLagna's history and reputation in the Linux community is mixed, to put it charitably -,see this page [4], put together by Piotr F. Mitros, for some particulars.

To become a voting member of LSA you have to pay cash -- not exactly in keeping with Open Source common practice -- and the group's Web site [5] does not reveal how much. LSA's charter awards to its two founding members veto power over anything relating to the term "Standard Linux," which LSA has trademarked.

Community comment on Slashdot [6] is dismissive and/or derisive, and rightly so.

Lawyers for Linux International have sent LSA a cease-and-desist letter [7] over the use of the Linux trademark, because of LSA's stated intention of to charge a fee for branding distributions as Linux Standard Compliant.

We're going to see more of this as Linux continues to build mo- mentum and to garner publicity. (Linus Torvalds was recently pho- tographed for a Forbes Magazine cover.) Let's agree to ignore the LSA and perhaps they'll sink into the obscurity they so richly deserve while the actual Linux community continues to go about the business of building great software.

Thanks to Doug Morris <doug@mhost.com> for details and links.

[3] http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,25453,00.html?tbtfM

[4] http://badragaz.ai.mit.edu/lsa/

[5] http://www.linuxstandards.org/

[6] http://slashdot.org/articles/980818/1247245.shtml

[7] http://www.linux-howto.com/linux.trademark