vivek khurana wrote: > >>I think certain trademark and other contractual >>obligations also ensure >>that you cannot even copy a RHEL distribution for >>your own use(not just >>redistribution). In other words, you can only >>install RHEL on the number >>of machines you have licence for. > > > As far as i am told by redhat executives, if you > install redhat on more machines than you have licence > for; redhat will support only those machines which > have licence. That means extra machines will not be > supported by redhat. >
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/esr_interview.html?page=last&x-showcontent=text [...] [Q] But Red Hat doesn't release all of its software as open source. [ESR] I believe they make their real money on a product (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) that is completely GPLed. If you know differently, can you tell me what other licenses they are using? [Q] It seems that Red Hat is selling its GNU/Linux distribution under a sort of user license that limits the freedom No. 2 provided by the GPL. The short version of the story, as I was told, is that if I buy a CD/DVD with the last Red Hat version and I make an ISO from that and put that online, I'll get sued. The same thing happens with computer magazines. They cannot include any Red Hat CD because the term Red Hat is a trademark or something like that, and they don't let the magazine use it without permission. And obviously they don't give you that permission. Magazines must use Fedora and never say Red Hat. [ESR] Excuse me while I fire up a browser and research this a bit... Ahhh... right, if you republish a RHEL CD in either form, you could get sued for illegal use of the embedded trademarks. I think I just found the user license in question. So the answer to your question is yes... Red Hat is a demonstration that you can have a profitable business based on entirely GPL code. You may have to play some interesting tricks with trademark law to do it, though. As I understand it now, what Red Hat has done is legally blocked republication of its entire RHEL distribution even though any component part is still GPLed and therefore freely redistributable. Damn, that's clever and sneaky. I like it. It serves everybody: Red Hat gets a fence around its product, but all the community objectives of open source licensing are still met. [Q] Do you consider this behavior coherent? [ESR] Yes. It makes logical and even ethical sense. [Q] Isn't one of the community objectives of open source licensing the possibility to share the code? So how can the fact that every single piece is still under GPL and thus redistributable, but if I take the whole CD/ISO it will be covered by the US trademark laws, be acceptable? [ESR] That's the beauty of it. The possibility of sharing the code is unaffected--what you can't "share" is Red Hat's integration work and branding. -- Sandip Bhattacharya * Puroga Technologies * [EMAIL PROTECTED] Work: http://www.puroga.com * Home/Blog: http://www.sandipb.net/blog PGP/GPG Signature: 51A4 6C57 4BC6 8C82 6A65 AE78 B1A1 2280 A129 0FF3 _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
