As the New York Times pointed out yesterday, "Red Hat's Fedora Project site already treats the name as a trademark and cites legal guidelines for using the term."

Here is what the site says:

The Fedora Name

Fedora is now a trademark of Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat will defend this trademark in order to protect the integrity of The Fedora Project. The rules for using the Fedora trademark will be generally more permissive than the rules for using the Red Hat trademarks. The separate name and trademark are necessary in order to have different rules for using the trademarks. The rules for using the "Fedora" trademark are available at http://fedora.redhat.com/about/trademarks/.

Red Hat's official "Red Hat" has been the Red Hat Fedora made by the New York Hat Company for many years.

The problem is that as long ago as 1997 computer scientists at Cornell University began working on a project to build a software tool, mainly for the benefit of librarians, that would blend content from various internal and external sources and present them in a unified form.

The New York Times quotes Carl Lagoze, a senior researcher in Cornell's information sciences department, as explaining that the project was named "FEDORA" because it was an acronym for Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture."

"We're a research project; we never had any active interest in grabbing the name," Lagoze said. But apparently that may be about to change, says the Times.

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