Re: [ilugd] Is it illegal to redistribute RHEL? Open Letter To Linux For You India print Magzine India

[M.S.Yatnatti CEO KPN UNLIMITD]

         
        
         
        




Dear Praveen ,Thank you for your inputs. My study
will continue  on the question  Is it illegal to redistribute RHEL?.and even I 
shall meet and seek inputs
from redhat people and get educated on the subject. I have  attended
several redhat presentations earlier at Bangalore. I have seen their
movie truth happens. For GPL also truth happens.First they ignore you, then 
they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. It has become
complex issue ,but need to be made simple.I have studied two views about this 
issue .I will study the issues in depth by online research and attending the 
redhat confrences and meeting FOSS leaders.i am collected lot of divergent 
views on the subject.i shall compile them and then leave it to the FOSS world 
to debate and decide.
Two views : 1 We don't need GPL any
more 

 2 .No GPL is strong .It cannot be
fooled.

Recently, during FISL (Fórum Internacional de Software
Livre) in Brazil, Eric Raymond gave a keynote speech about the open
source model of development in which he said, "We don't need the
GPL anymore. It's based on the belief that open source software is
weak and needs to be protected. Open source would be succeeding
faster if the GPL didn't make lots of people nervous about adopting
it." Federico Biancuzzi decided to interview Eric Raymond to
learn more about that.It is available at

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/30/esr_interview.html
Part of Interview extract i quote here.
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?
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.
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.

Few of others have quoted the following:
The fact that code will be GPLed thanks to the virality clause as
you sum it up does not imply any type of rights grant to other types
of Intellectual Property (IP) contained in the module, notably
trademarks.
A piece of code may very well be under GPL (think Redhat
distribution), but still not distributable as such with the trademark
"RedHat" all over the place, because it would constitute
trademark infrigement (which is why Redhat clones carefully remove
the RedHat brand from their distros). 

Which means that redistributing some of this GPLed code may still
need some work around the other types of IP protection like  CENTOS is REbuild 
of RHEL.

Few others quote:
No GPL is strong .It
cannot be fooled.: GPL is strong. No body can play any tricks with
GPL. No body can limit the freedoms given by GPL. No body can create
proprietary systems using GPLed software's .  Trademark's can be used
by any company only where it owns the property in which it has its
own Copyrights. Linux and GPLed software's are copyrights not owned
by Redhat .RHEL is a Linux distribution .As long as Linux is in the
distribution RHEL is redistributable. Redhat  cannot legally enforce
its trademark's in RHEL. The GPL says that anyone who receives a copy
from you has the right to redistribute copies, modified or not. You
are not allowed to distribute the work on any more restrictive basis
.Redhat has insulted the Linux community by removing  penguin
trademark's of Linux in RHEL. By providing consultancy service and
support redhat can earn money as many others are doing. In pursuit of
money some one cannot be allowed to limit the GPL freedoms. You
cannot incorporate GPL-covered software in a proprietary system. FSF 
and GPL cannot be fooled like this.The goal of the GPL is to grant
everyone the freedom to copy, redistribute, understand, and modify a
program. If you could incorporate GPL-covered software into a
non-free system, it would have the effect of making the GPL-covered
software non-free too. A system incorporating a GPL-covered program
is an extended version of that program. The GPL says that any
extended version of the program must be released under the GPL if it
is released at all. This is for two reasons: to make sure that users
who get the software get the freedom they should have, and to
encourage people to give back improvements that they make.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
There are  Three paragraphs under the caption Trademarks and they are
very clear and they are  part of Guidelines for Free System
Distributions and not guide lines for making commercial distribution
or a proprietary OS out of GPLed software .Please make note of this
point .Please note that you cannot make commercial distribution out
of  Guidelines for Free System Distributions .These guidelines  don't
tell you  violate  freedom given at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html .It states  that
Similarly, the distribution itself may hold particular trademarks. It
is not a problem for these marks to be in the distribution, as long
as they can be readily removed without losing the system's
functionality. It means that let RHEL provide menu in the system
itself that with click of mouse trade mark can be removed  readily 
without affecting  system's functionality and user can use it and
distribute it. You cannot ask user to do it. It says readily means
readily users should be able to remove it. Because paragraph two says
 In extreme cases, these restrictions may effectively render the
program non free .It is unfair for someone to ask you to remove a
trademark from modified code if that trademark is scattered all
throughout the original source. As long as the conditions are
reasonable, however, free system distributions may include
these programs, either with or without the trademarks. But you cannot
use trademarks to make system non-free as per GPL. Holding the
trademark is different and  however, free system distributions may
include these programs, either with or without the trademarks. but
redhat  making RHEL  non free and commercial is different. which I
feel is the violation of GPL in two counts one at 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
and 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html.
  That is not allowing redistribution  and making commercial
distribution RHEL using all GPLed software violating  Guidelines for
Free System Distributions. An “aggregate” consists of a number of
separate programs, distributed together on the same CD-ROM or other
media. The GPL permits you to create and distribute an aggregate,
even when the licenses of the other software are non-free or
GPL-incompatible. The only condition is that you cannot release the
aggregate under a license that prohibits users from exercising rights
that each program's individual license would grant them.Thanks for listening.I 
dont need spoon feeding.I need feeding only on
the subject.No personal attacks.i am just a linux user.After my study
is completed i shall inform you all.Till then by .Thankh you.M.S.Yatnatti 




      
_______________________________________________
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/