Lindows Allowed to Use Company Name in Holland

Supp0rtLinux writes "It appears that Lindows/Linspire has finally made some headway against Microsoft in the Netherlands. According this article, the Judge ruled that Linspire's continued, but minimal use of 'Lindows' for legal and trademark purposes doesn't violate Microsoft's trademark. With the US court date on this issue coming up soon, one can only wonder if Microsoft will have effectively cut off its nose to spite its face. And following immediately on the heels of today's Netherlands news, the latest Michael's Minutes from Linspire pegs all the blame for virus problems on Microsoft and basically says that Linux (well, Lindows anyway) is the cure."

Re:Who started using the term WINDOW(s) ?

[bheer]

For the last time, people: NO. It was the "X Window System".

Re:Linux is magically more secure

[Erasmus Darwin]

"And the fact that all home users were "root" by default prior to XP means nothing?"

Apparently, Lindows was guilty of this even more recently than Windows. From a July 21, 2002 Washington Post article [washingtonpost.com]:

But the single worst feature of Lindows lurks under its colorful interface. Lindows sets the PC's owner up to run the machine as its "root" user, with unrestricted access to every system command and capability, no matter how potentially damaging. Worse yet, the test system left the root password blank.

However, for the record, I've seen passing references while googling that indicate this has been fixed. But the point still stands that if you're going to criticize Microsoft for doing this in the past, it's only fair to criticize Lindows for also doing this in the past.

Slightly OT: The Netherlands, Holland, Dutch

[Serious Simon]

If the country is called The Netherlands, then what is Holland? and who are the Dutch?

The official name of the country is Nederland (The Netherlands) which is an appropriate name as a considerable area of the country actually lies below sea level, protected by dikes that keep the water out.

Holland is the name of two provinces in the West of the country, with port cities Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and the seat of the government The Hague. Historically, international trade was done mostly out of Holland, therefore this name is often used for the whole country throughout the world.

"Dutch" is the English word for the language of the Netherlands, it is related to the German word for "German" which is "Deutsch". The Dutch call themselves "Nederlanders".

Re:Mandatory Linux vulnerability disagreement here

[mpe]

Think of all those vulnerabilities that are defaults in Windows. Think also about the fact that most Linux distros do not encourage the user to run as "root". Not that Linux has no potential vulnerabilities, but they are much fewer than Windows..

The other difference is that Linux code, both kernel and application, is more likely to be modular and structured.
Both because this is the "unix way" but also because it's far easier for a diverse group of developers to work with such code.

Re:Irony

[mpe]

What's sad about this is that Linspire could EASILY do this the way OS X does it. When you install something in OS X, a box pops up asking for the admininstrator password. It's easy and maintains security for the system level stuff.

As well as maintaining a distinction between "administrator" and "user" tasks. Which means that it is far more difficult to get the "click on a web link and have some malware quietly installed" senario.