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Hibernate Trademark

Stefan Tilkov,

Ted Neward cites a letter sent out by RedHat attorneys to someone offering Hibernate training:

Red Hat, Inc. has become aware that your company is offering Hibernate training courses. Red Hat does not allow the use of its trademarks without a written agreement.

Ted is absolutely right to consider this idiotic (and the commenters on his blog, at least the first six, are just dumb), but Ted also misses one point: This is not at all related to RedHat. In fact JBoss, Inc. used the same strategy long before.

Oh yes, and before I get the same kind of comments here: They key is not that they need to protect their trademark, which is perfectly fine. If they sent a letter saying you need to refer to “Hibernate” as “Hibernate™”, that would be perfectly fine. The key is this:

Red Hat does not allow the use of its trademarks without a written agreement.

That’s just stupid, because they can stop you from selling your own OR mapper as “Hibernate”, but they can’t stop you from selling “Training for Hibernate™”.