On Friday 17 November 2006 23:24, M. Fioretti wrote: > E.g., to get Centos from RHEL you must, more or less, only strip and > replace all the occurrences of Red Hat strings, logos and similar from > the sources and recompile. A semi-automatic process.
Who says you have to do this?
Surf on down to your /usr/src/linux/kernel directory and type:
grep -i "copyright" *.c
Count how many different companies names appear in SUSE's source in
just one single directory.
Red Hat is in there, along with HP, SGI, and IBM.
You need merely add your own copyright, without removing any prior one. In
fact the GPL seems to require this.
> If Linux violates sw patents, to change ANY Linux distribution to
> something patent-free you must first *find* all the places in the
> source where violations occur and then, for each of them, figure out
> and develop another _algorithm_ to do the same thing. Assuming another
> way _exists_, of course.
If any Linux distro was released under the GPL (and they all are), then
any of your patented code you insert in your distro is given free and
clear to the community. If you inserted someone elses code, it would
have to come out of every distro, and the community would jointly arrive
at a solution.
Go back and count how many times Red Hat code was forked, TurboLinux,
Centos, Mandrake, come quickly to mind, but there are probably 8 others.
Its not as expensive as you think. It might take quite a while to break even,
and start making money, but even Mepis is profitable on the scale that the
choose to operate.
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John Andersen
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