Autoridade no Mundo LINUX -John Maddog

maddog: Well, Linux International is a vendor organization. I know a lot of people who have been confused about that and think that we are a user group, but we try to concentrate on vendor issues, things like portability of applications, and binary interfaces, and that the same application runs across all platforms.

When the issue came up about the trademark and the guy trying to capture the trademark, we raised the money for the lawyer to defend that. Then we went ahead to try to get the trademark trade-marked in all the other countries. We're keeping those for the Linux community.

This isn't to keep people from using the word Linux, as long as they have a legitimate reason, and use the word Linux for free. It is to make sure that the word "Linux" is there for people to use when they want to.

We also do things like set up events at trade shows, help to organize Linux pavilions. We talk to the press to try to give them an even-handed version of Linux, you know, what Linux is and how it works.

From time to time, we sponsor events. For example, the ALS show. We helped to sponsor it the second year that they had it. That was the year that it went from basically a couple people getting together to having 500 attendees and 43 vendors. The year after that it was 2,000 attendees and 60 vendors. We lent them some money up front. We gave them some guidance on how to do it (how to put together a show), and they did all the work. That's the type of thing LI likes to do.

We also help Vendors new to Linux, who have no idea how to reach the Linux marketplace. They have questions about the GPL, all those types of things. We try to help them out.