I want to host some Fedora cloud images on a website for people to download. These are constructed using a kickstart which just installs @Core into a VM, as simple as it gets.
To comply with licensing, I was planning to point people who wanted source back to Fedora, since we don't make any modifications. Also I will publish the kickstart file and the short (20 line) shell script that makes the images.
However the question arises if we need to do anything else from a licensing / providing source / other legal point of view?
For example, is it a problem that Fedora deletes old SRPMs?
Is it a problem if we don't host the source ourselves?
Does the trademark exception cover our (non-commercial, community) offering, assuming I comply with the required terms here? https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines#Usage_That_Does_No...
Basically, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, are there any "unknown unknowns" I should be aware of?
Rich.
On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 12:50:33PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
I want to host some Fedora cloud images on a website for people to download. These are constructed using a kickstart which just installs @Core into a VM, as simple as it gets.
Is there a reason to not use the official Fedora cloud images?
On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 09:13:35AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 12:50:33PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
I want to host some Fedora cloud images on a website for people to download. These are constructed using a kickstart which just installs @Core into a VM, as simple as it gets.
Is there a reason to not use the official Fedora cloud images?
That's part 2 of this exercise. Would like to talk to you about that separately at some point.
Rich.
On 10/01/2013 07:50 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
I want to host some Fedora cloud images on a website for people to download. These are constructed using a kickstart which just installs @Core into a VM, as simple as it gets.
IANAL, this is not legal advice.
You (as the distributor) are responsible for complying with the license terms for all of the software included in those cloud images. If you feel comfortable that Fedora will continue to provide the corresponding SRPMs for everything in those cloud images (since you are making no changes to the Fedora bits in the images), we would not impose any additional hosting requirements upon you for those SRPMS. That said, in the same breath, we make no guarantee that Fedora will host the corresponding SRPMS to the binary bits that you use in your cloud image (although, we probably will). Stick to the GA packages or updates in the stable branch and your likelyhood approaches 99.9 percent.
If you worry that you may someday be approached to provide corresponding source for something you distributed in that cloud image (per the license for that $SOMETHING), and Fedora no longer distributes that exact binary $SOMETHING (and thus, no longer distributes the corresponding source), then you may wish to keep a copy of the SRPMs used in creating your cloud image.
WRT your trademark question, I believe that the trademark guidelines cover your case here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines#Virtual_images_or_...
Thus, no additional permission is required from Fedora to use the trademarks as long as you are in compliance with the bullet points in that section.
I hope this helps answer your questions, please feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions.
Thanks,
~tom
== Fedora Project
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Matthew Miller -
Richard W.M. Jones -
Tom Callaway