On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, Andy Green wrote: >> wished to release CD's of the Fedora Project, Could I do so under another >> name without infrigning on anyone's rights? In other words, I may wish to >> have burned CD's available of the Source and Binaries, but not call it >> Fedora, so that people can order the same for a small fee. Is this >> feasibale under the Fedora Project, or will this be considered an >> infringement of the rights of the developers and contributors? > >You can't use the Redhat-specific art in this case, nor the Redhat-owned >trademarks (whatever they are, "Redhat" at least). Redhat seem to put these >goodies in nicely separate packages. > >Otherwise there's nothing wrong with this as I understand it, for example >Mandrake is a fork of Redhat from some time ago. Redhat do not own the >copyright on the vast bulk of the things in Fedora, so no rights are >infringed for those things. Copyright isn't the issue anyway. Red Hat *does* own the copyright on a lot of software in the distribution, either having written it entirely inhouse (redhat-config-* et al), or having made major contributions to a piece of software such as the kernel, etc. It isn't copyright ownership which allows or prevents someone from copying/modifying/redistributing/using software however, it is "licensing". All Red Hat written software included in Fedora (and previously in Red Hat Linux) are GPL licensed, MIT licensed, or some similar open source license. They are copyright by Red Hat, and others can use them however they see fit under the given license (like any other OSS software). >For the redhat-* utils I don't know how they are licensed, I >assume they are also GPL-d in which case you can have those too. Yep. >Definitely the case for Redhat's anaconda which Debian seem to >be incorporating. I guess that redhat-* utils might need >renaming to avoid trademark horror, or maybe that would be >exactly the wrong thing to do. Maybe someone from Redhat can >clarify. I've been told that the "redhat-" in the software name is part of the program's name itself and so needn't be changed, however I don't remember who told me this and wether or not it was official legal advice. If someone wants to modify a tool, they're free to do so as it's OSS. Of course we would much rather if people work together, and contribute their efforts back to the future developement of the tools rather than fork them off on their own. That makes OSS processes work together for everyone than splitting off unnecessarily. Of course people can always rename the tool if they see fit or want to be safe too. Still best to share development if possible though. >I hope somebody does this distro wrapping action for >non-financial reasons, in order at least to make a tracking >version of Fedora which includes mpg123 and mplayer in the >install directly. Its the great power of the GPL that people >making new stuff can stand on the shoulders of giants like this. It's definitely clear that anything having the "Fedora" name and any Red Hat trademarks attached to it will not contain mpg123 or any other MP3 related software. If someone wanted to whip up a distribution based on Fedora which contained any potentially illegal software, they would definitely have to remove all Red Hat trademarks. That said, it is indeed the great power of the GPL and other OSS software licenses that make things like this possible. And that in turn provides software longevity in one form or another, and freedom of expression, freedom of sharing, freedom of innovation, etc. So for me personally at least, I hope to see people use the distribution for whatever purposes they like that benefit them. I also hope that any good modifications they make, they contribute back to the various upstream projects that comprise the distribution as well, including the redhat-* tools, etc. and any other patches to the installer, etc.. Those efforts can then benefit Fedora Core 2 development as well, and give Fedora based distributions less stuff to have to carry around and maintain themselves too. Hope this helps, TTYL -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
