Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Mon Sep 22 18:36:46 UTC 2003


On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 13:12, Jos Vos wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 12:53:29PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > This table attempts to summarize the difference between our operating
> > system products and the Fedora Project:
> > http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
> > 
> > Red Hat will be doing a lot of development and other work on the Fedora
> > Project, but it's not a product that you can buy from us. We're working
> > on the Fedora Project in the same way that we work on other projects
> > such as Mozilla or the Linux kernel.
> 
> Well, I can't read this different from "Red Hat stops delivering a
> freely available Linux distribution", which I consider bad news :-(.

"freely available" could be misleading, remember that our products are
still open source, the issue here is freeness of beer not speech.

It is accurate that don't currently plan more commercial products for
free (beer) download in binary form.

> Related to "freely available": it's not completely clear what the
> "Licensing: open source" and the "Downloads: source only, or ..."
> in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux column on the above referred page
> *exactly* means w.r.t. what people/companies outside Red Hat may
> or mayt not do with it.  I guess I have to read the trademark-related
> pages at the Red Hat site for that?

You have to read the RHEL agreement, I can't find the link right now but
various people have posted it in the past. Trademark guidelines apply
but probably aren't the primary issue in governing what you can do.

My understanding is that you have the rights under the open source
licenses to use, modify, and distribute (we cannot and do not want to
remove these), but to get maintenance and support *from us* you have to
subscribe per-system.

But of course I am not a lawyer or official spokesperson, you really
have to read the agreement and you may want to talk to the Red Hat
salespeople as they answer questions about this kind of thing all day.

Havoc






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