I’m not a suse user nor am I a programmer but as graphic and web designer I thought this was a little outrageous. I found the Suse logo being ripped off as a cheap logo template and being sold with thousands of other cheap logos for 50 euros on this site: Download Logo Templates & LogoMaker / Logo Creation Software
You should report them to Novell’s legal team so Novell can sue the S*** out of them … The F****** B*******! All are lizards are belong to us!! Didn’t they know that? F****** thieves
Seriously though, report them to Novell! This isn’t funny
Alright, I’ve reported it to Novell’s legal team. Thanks for making us aware of this. I also talked to Andreas Jaeger on #opensuse-project IRC room and he said to contact Novell, actually gave me the address to do so.
I don’t know quite how they think they can get away with things like that. I think maybe they just think - if you can call it that - “Open source, innit? You can nick it and they don’t care.”
Oh well.
This also happened quite recently to an Arch Linux logo, and unfortunately some Arch users decided to bombard the company concerned with abusive emails, obviously not reflecting well on the distro, or on Linux users generally.
The SUSE lizard is not “open source” - it’s not a program or put in the public domain under some Fair Share license or Free Artistic one. It’s a registered trademark of a company that earns its living with open source technologies. Before using it in your products you earn $$$ from, you should ask the parent company for permission
It’s great that users are passionate about protecting the products they use and love but that is certainly not the way to deal with these type of situations because, as you said, it makes its users look like fools because the abuser will just simply see the subject line of an email and press DELETE!.. but letting the company take care of it’s image infringement through professional avenues makes sure it covers all the necessary ground and the abuser will simply have no leg to stand on when their finished with them.
If you think that’s bad, there are a line of dispensers for condoms and “adult novelties” which I’ve seen in public toilets now and then, which have a character which is unmistakeably a slightly modified version of the BSD Daemon splashed over the front rotfl!. Same pose as some of the artwork used on FreeBSD banners, for example. Very cheeky and surely illegal- quite sure that art can’t be in the public domain (or under any sort of license that would allow this sort of… unusual usage :P)
I guess Hell must be overpopulated so to somehow control it, peeps in charge there came up with the brilliant idea of selling condoms with deamons on them so those who belong to Hell but still dwell on Earth can recognize them as being for them only >:)
Agreed. It isn’t any excuse, but I think in the Arch case maybe the company brought it upon themselves somewhat by flatly denying it when they were first confronted, despite the logo being literally geometrically identical to the copyright holders’ - much like in this instance. It simply isn’t a coincidence, it isn’t “drawing inspiration from” or “an interpretation of”; it’s a copy. They could at least have had the decency to horizontally flip it.
In a law court they’d be eaten alive, and as you say, that’s exactly the point - as long as responsible people are prepared to report these things to the appropriate people, no need for anyone to make a scene. Very good of you to do so, especially as you say you’re not a suse user.
I’m not sure about who designed it or why they exactly chose a lizard, but from what I heard on IRC a while back was that there was a contest and the lizard came out as best. I don’t know how true that is though. There are a lot of small variations of Geeko (the lizard’s name ;))
I recall George Harrison being sued for his song My Sweet Lord infringing on He’s So Fine of about ten years earlier. He swore to the end that he had never even heard the song, although the judge suggested that he may have heard it in the background at one time, and the melody remained in his subconscious. This was plausible, and I doubt there was any malicious intent.
Then there’s the “room full of monkeys” theory, where every combination or scheme will be repeated just by chance
The same George Harrison who played with a certain four-piece ensemble whose track “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” most definitely wasn’t even vaguely about drugs?
… The F****** B*******! All are lizards are belong to us!! Didn’t they know that? F****** thieves
