On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Matt Wilson wrote:
>Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 00:23:07 -0400
>From: Matt Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Subject: Re: custom dist based on Redhat
>
>Copyright law is fairly clear here. You *must not* remove
>"Copyright YYYY Red Hat, Inc." from copyright statements. You may
>append to copyright statements if significant changes have been made
>to the source code that warrant copyright protection, and you choose
>to claim copyright on those changes.
Absolutely. That is why I recommend _against_ doing carte
blanche search and replace 's/[Rr]ed.*[Hh]at/whatever/g' on
things. There is no point other than to try and strip Red Hat of
credit due, and in the process destroy copyright notices, and
set one's self up for possible legal trouble and an angry Linux
community. (See LinuxONE for a perfect example..)
Anyone making a dist based on Red Hat, has a free product with
which to start with, and aside from changing the dist name to
distinguish it from the Official Red Hat Linux, they should leave
all copyright notices and credits in place. Also, if packages
are unmodified, I think it makes sense to also leave the
packaging credits to Red Hat as well, etc..
Stripping out Red Hat's name just to make it look like it is a
separate distribution originally based on Red Hat, but which is
really just Red Hat renamed (like Mandrake was originally) is
just bad taste IMHO.
>Now, the issue of trademark usage is different. You may not call
>products that are not Offical Red Hat products "Red Hat Linux". This
>is especially important for people doing things like selling CD-R
>burned copies of Red Hat Linux on sites like eBay. Now, selling the
>software is completely legal. You're given the right to do that by
>the GPL and other licenses on the core OS CDs. However, you do not
>have the right to use the Red Hat Linux name when selling those
>products. This is to protect consumers from confusion when buying
>products.
Yep, and it also protects Red Hat from getting tech support calls
from people thinking that they are buying the official Red Hat
product when they are not, even if it is an exact duplicate.
Red Hat has no obligation to provide support for CD's bought and
burned elsewhere.
Also, before someone even thinks of bashing Red Hat for not
allowing someone to officially use their name.... When someone
holds a trademark, they must protect it against abuse, or if
they do not, they can lose their trademark. IANAL, but I recall
discussions of this in the past.
>An overview of Red Hat's trademarks and their usage, see:
>
>http://www.redhat.com/about/trademark_guidelines.html
Bookmarked for future ref..
Take care,
TTYL
--
Mike A. Harris Linux advocate
Computer Consultant GNU advocate
Capslock Consulting Open Source advocate
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