I do no know if you were aware of this, but in order to protect the Linux mark, Torvalds had to to register it as a comercial brand (or so I understood), becoming Linux® or Linux™. Apparently what this means is that those companies that actually make money off Linux (Linspire, Xandros, Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, etc) have to buy a license in order to be able to use the Linux part in their product's names. From what I've read, the lisences range from $200 to $5000 USD. You can get more details at the official Linux Mark Institute web site, and various articles and blog postings. I haven't followed any of the main Linux mailing lists (KML) or distribution centric mailing lists.

It certainly surprises me that not many other Linux centric sites have discussed this issue in the past days (here, and some other Linux centric discussion sites).

What do you think of all this?

Edit:
PS: I've also posted this in other sites, since I would really like to know what the community thinks about this.

Start by looking in the other threads and forums on this site to see what Linus actually said, and why he said it. There are plenty of other, authoritative sites already quoted.

Linux(R) is, and has been for a long time, a registered trademark. There are certain requirements under US law that trademark holders must abide, or risk losing their trademark status and the protections that it entails (in this case, estopping any misleading use of the mark). To do that, Linus must abide by the letter of the law. And that is what he is doing.

Let's try to consolidate all these threads... we're repeating repeating ourselves ourselves.

I'm sorry for duplicating issues, I did not see (even though I searched) anything that would point me to these discussions. My aplogies. I must admit I usually suck at the search engines