On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
On 2/22/06, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No, it's not clear. First you complain about them removing
the tradmarks, then continue with a complaint about when
they tried to give some credit. Which is it you'd prefer?
They were never pretending to 'be' RedHat but they did
try to describe the origin and legal status of the product.
I would prefer they leave the distribution of Red Hat Enterpise Linux
to Red Hat Software, Incorporated. What you seem to be missing here
is this, Les (and others): "I do not care what they do to be in the
clear legally, I think they're in the moral wrong."
You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but Red Hat seems to have
less of a problem with this issue than you do.
While RH is legally obligated by the (L)GPL to offer source to the (L)GPL
components of their Linux distributions to their customers, they are not
under any obligation to offer that source to the public. Nor are they
obligated to offer source for other components either to their customers
or the public. Yet they do.
More to the point, they are under no obligation to offer the source to the
public in the form of the exact SRPMs they use to build RHEL. Yet they do
that as well. And they distribute their updates the same way. If they
felt that the clone distros were detrimental to their business model, I
would think they would stop doing that. Note that many of those RPMs are
interdependent, so they can't have any expectation that people won't build
complete distributions using them.
[Reductio ad absurdum argument deleted]
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
