[Fedora-legal-list] Verifying Fedora from unofficial remixes that have removed the Fedora trademarks

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 11/01/2010 05:14 PM, Karsten Wade wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 09:00:41AM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
>> We can encourage Fedora Remixes to list themselves on a wiki page, but I
>> do not think we need to require this. I do not think it is in the
>> interest of anyone to make it any more difficult for someone to make a
>> derivative work or remix of Fedora.
> I could see a web application that made it easy for remixers to
> provide all sorts of information about what, where, how, why, who,
> when, and so forth.  Even more, I could see an active special interest
> group in Fedora that attracted remixers by giving them reasons to be
> involved.  A sort-of meta-community of remixers, who themselves might
> be the tip of many thousands of remix users.

We have had http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions which is 
not working out that well I would say.
Perhaps as you suggest a stand alone web application would work better 
than the wiki but I still fear that it stays the same since there is no 
motivating factor or direct requirements for them to provide that 
information to us thus it would not be maintained any better then a 
simple wiki page.

If you think about it they already get what they need from us why would 
they contribute anything back if they dont have to?

I personally see nothing wrong in having them register those remixes 
with us for measurements and research purposes at least we would be 
getting something back from them that way instead of those remixes just 
remaining unknown entity out there without us knowing of their existence 
nor if they are actually contributing anything back to the project or 
directly upstream for that matter ( upstream being other than Fedora in 
that term ).

Regarding Remix SIG I think it would be better to strengthen the already 
existing Spin SIG rather then creating a new one...

> The concern is, anything that is automatic without opt-in is going to
> need a HUGE amount of visibility to the Fedora community.  People are
> wary of being tracked and reported on, so they would have to know
> early what was being tracked, why, how, how it was aggregated,
> anonymized, and so forth.  All of that decided, openly, before a
> single line of code need be written.

Certainly.

> Smolt was created originally as a response to a situation where we
> weren't going to go through that last paragraph of hassle with the
> Fedora community.  Could the data needs you are talking about utilize
> the existing Smolt + grow a remixer community?

Comparing what's present on smolt with what's mentioned on distrowatch 
then we only got a handful of potential derivatives that are being 
reported and there are only 3 that are present in smolt, on distrowatch 
and on our wiki page at the same time ( Ojuba, Mythdora and Linpus).

Without knowing what these remixes are how are we going to be able to 
tell good remixes from potentially bad ones?

As an example smolt is reporting 25 people using Fedora release 15 ( 
Finian ).  What we know is that Fedora 15 is in development and is 
referred by us and smolt as rawhide and certainly has not been 
officially released yet.

Finian is not one of the names that got suggested for Fedora release 15 
names. ( That name should be announced today given that the voting ended 
at midnight ).

So is Fedora release 15 ( Finian ) a cracked version of Fedora that some 
25 unsuspecting users are using thinking that it is the latest and 
greatest from Fedora or is it simply Rawhide remixed in Finnish?

JBG
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