On Sun, Aug 03, 2003, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote about "Trademarks, copyright licenses, the GPL and RedHat": > This includes their logo and name used on the software on their CDs. If > you want to distribute the software, you need to remove their trademark > from it. >... > Does this violate the principles of Free Software (note that I didn't > say anything about the GPL license - IANAL, I'm asking if you think it > hurts violates the philosophy of Free Software):
According to the GPL, I am allowed to make verbatim copies of GPLed binaries (this this just one of the rights the GPL gives you). So that if Redhat's installer is GPL, I am allowed to copy it, complete with the Redhat logos in the installation process. I am also allowed to copy programs like "redhat-config-apache" (or whatever), and the "redhat-release" package because they are marked GPL too (at least on the Redhat 7.3 that I checked). So Redhat cannot forbid you from using those things on a derived distribution unless they stop distributing those things under the GPL! Of course, the GPL doesn't say anything about naming your final package, or the logos you print on the CDs. Here Redhat does have a case for not allowing you to use the name "Red Hat". I don't think that this violates the spirit of the GPL. The GPL was designed to allow forking, but it wasn't meant to encourage confusion - forks should be named differently, to prevent confusion. Whether these forks should be named similarly (Emacs vs. Xemacs, Mosix vs. OpenMosix) or completely differently (GCC vs. Egcs) is a long-standing question. My opinion is that the wishes of the original author should be respected if possible. Some will want the name of their original project to live-on in the new fork (e.g., Stallman gets credit even for the XEmacs fork), and some apparently don't want that (like Redhat). There's a delicate issue with forks that are named similarly to the original project: the name of the fork might unfairly imply something bad about the original project. For a long time, the name "XEmacs" suggested to a lot of people that the original "Emacs" had no X-Windows support. The name "OpenMosix" suggests that the original "Mosix" is closed. A hypothetical product GoodRedhat might suggest that the original Redhat was bad. -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Aug 4 2003, 6 Av 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Christopher Robin Hood steals from the http://nadav.harel.org.il |rich and gives to the Pooh. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
