I’ve read with great interest about the dirt-cheap PCs that Wal-Mart has been selling.
It turns out that these not-so-wimpy internet appliances (128Mb of RAM, 10Gb of disk, and built-in 10/100 Ethernet) are running an new operating system called LindowsOS which is really just Linux + KDE 3.0 and some really easy to use management tools.
I’ve never been a fan of Linux on the desktop. Going against the Microsoft grain is such an uphill battle, and if you’re going to go that route it seems like Mac OS X is the right approach anyways. But I’m now rooting for Lindows because it appears that there’s a little bit of a trademark battle going on over the use of the Lindows name.
If the true test of trademark infringement is confusion in the marketplace, I think it’s going to be difficult to make the argument that people would think that Lindows was a Microsoft product.