Rebranding / Remixing / Respinning Fedora

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

As clarified by Jesse on IRC:

The Fedora Project distributes under 3a, and 3a alone.

This means there is practically no way for any Remixer or Respinner to
distribute their product under anything other then 3a as well.

For the Fedora Project to start distributing under 3b so that Remixers
and Respinners can use 3c is too big of an investment to make right now
-without knowing whom exactly benefit from it, it's gonna cost like
millions and millions of bits of storage, really dazzling.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip

Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Regarding the legal issues of Rebranding, Remixing and Respinning
> Fedora, I want to ask some questions regarding to providing the sources.
> 
> First of all there is the "genuine Fedora" branch of custom
> distributions; all parts included come from Fedora (Remix), and/or it
> contains updates (Respin), and it does not need any rebranding
> whatsoever. In fact, we may feel like hosting, mirroring or linking to
> these distributions at some point.
> 
> For these distributions, GPLv2 requires that you distribute or make
> available the sources of whatever you distribute alongside the binaries,
> or include instructions to obtain the sources, or (3c), provide the
> instructions you have gotten yourself. For some of us, this isn't a problem.
> 
> However, if a Respin (definitely including updates) or Remix (possibly
> including updates) needs to also distribute or make available the
> sources, they could have pointed to the Fedora mirrors if only the
> updates (and their source RPMs) wouldn't expire from these mirrors.
> 
> Having a Respin include update foo-1.0.1, which is being replaced by
> update foo-1.0.2 a day later, which expires the source RPM for foo-1.0.1
> as well, prevents the ones distributing the Respin or Remix from
> GPL-compliance as the sources for foo-1.0.1 are no longer publicly
> available. The Respin or Remix ends up to be non-distributable unless
> someone finds the resources to also host the source.
> 
> Is there some kind of archive of all updates ever released? Is that
> koji? Can Respinners and Remixes just point people to koji? As (afaik)
> the Fedora Project releases under 3a and 3b of GPLv2, can we not make it
> so people that do Respins/Remixes can use 3c? E.g., include the complete
> instructions for retrieving the sources for anything the Fedora Project
> releases, whether it be actual releases or updates, in the Fedora
> Release Notes? It'd maybe save a lot of people a lot of trouble, and
> thus enable a lot more people to start remixing Fedora and distribute
> the results.
> 
> That's todays question.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Jeroen van Meeuwen
> -kanarip
> 
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