Policy Question & Noise Level

[Mike A. Harris]

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