Donald Tevault wrote: > and I happen to know that Ethan Galstad is extremely jealous of the > Nagios trademark. The Nagios company is one of the few IT companies around > that only allows "official training partners" to offer training courses for > their products. Anyone else who gets caught doing it will get slapped with > legal action.
This is not to be construed as legal advice, but IMHO trademark law doesn't really help there. The point of trademark law is to keep other people from passing off their own monitoring software as “Nagios”, or for that matter their own Nagios courses as “official Nagios courses”, with the intent to deceive their customers. A trademark on “Nagios” doesn't mean that nobody is allowed to say “Nagios” except with Ethan Galstad's consent. Even in the face of a trademark on Nagios you're perfectly free to talk about Nagios – in training materials, books, classes, or wherever – for as long as you want, provided that you're talking about the genuine original article (and not some el-cheapo wannabe knockoff that people might confuse with the real thing). Which doesn't mean they won't sue you anyway, and – especially in the US – civil litigation isn't so much about who is right as it is about who has the most money to burn, but at least here in Germany a trademark suit against a provider of expressly-inofficial Nagios classes would probably be laughed out of court. I have taught enough Nagios classes in my day, never been sued, and don't expect to be. Having said that, other people have already mentioned that we can simply replace “Nagios” with “Icinga” and be done with the problem, so that's probably the best approach. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau … Linup Front GmbH (MAX21) … Linux- & Open-Source-Schulungen anselm.ling...@linupfront.de, +49(0)6151-9067-0, Fax -299, www.linupfront.de Robert-Koch-Str. 9, 64331 Weiterstadt Post: Postf. 100121, 64201 Darmstadt DE Sitz: Weiterstadt (AG Darmstadt, HRB7705) Geschf: Oliver Michel, Nils Manegold _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list lpi-examdev@lpi.org http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
