Lindows Offered To Drop LindowsOS Name.

Now there's an interesting concession. Lindows.com offered not to call its prospective hybrid desktop operating system LindowsOS, if Microsoft would call off its trademark infringement suit against the start-up, but Microsoft rejected the offer according to Lindows.com CEO Michael Robertson.

Microsoft is demanding that Lindows .com be enjoined from calling itself that for fear it'll be confused in the popular imagination with Windows.

LindowsOS, which is late to market, is the one that through the grace of the Wine Project is supposed to run both Windows and Linux apps. That's why Robertson says he called it Lindows in the first place - "to convey this unique compatibility between the Linux OS and Windows applications" - which one might gather is what really sticks in Microsoft's craw. A non-Microsoft platform serving up Windows productivity apps. How well or how many, of course, remains to be seen.

Lindows.com released the legal papers it filed in its defense a few days ago and, pleading "devastating loss of good will and consumer identity," the months-old operation says that being forced to drop its name would effectively shut it down since its web site is its only route to market.

It would effectively lose the $1.5 million it's put into defining and promoting the Lindows.com and LindowsOS brands, would have to spend $250,000 altering its web site and collateral material and might lose a chance at getting the financing critical to continue its R&D, it said.

Naturally it played the antitrust card and said the only reason Microsoft is picking on it is to preserve its operating system monopoly by quashing competition from a Linux alternative. It told the court, ahead of a hearing on Wednesday, February 27, that putting it out of business by denying ...