On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 10:25:50AM +0300, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: > And this very definition might be quite significant regarding what you > can or can't do with the software. Isn't it?
> I talked to a rep a few months ago, and he told me I can't e.g. purchase > a license (or subscription, or whatever it's called) for one year, > install a machine with it, then continue using it for more than one > year, because of this trademark thing. You're confusing free as in the GPL and free as in beer. The GPL does not restrict people from charging for their products, it requires that if you release the source code for them. There is a gray area, not to me but to several large companies, that you can release a product under the GPL, solicit modifications to it under the GPL and then sell the modified code as proprietary to companies who will modify it and not release the source code. One company did this and it was well documented, while their product is still well supported and well thought of by many users, some on this list. That is very different from BSD's artistic license which says (I'm paraphrasing) "here it is, you can do what you want with it". > That I will (theoretically) need > to chase each and every mention of any of their trademarks, in any of > the files on the system, and remove it. I didn't feel like arguing, and > did not ask a laywer, but I really don't know if he has any substance in > what he said. It also depends upon where you buy it from. RedHat has their license terms, there is nothing from stopping a vendor from adding their own license terms. You are free to buy the product from them or not. Requiring you to buy a yearly support contract may in fact, be part of the license. The advantage of the GPL is that you are free to download the source code, compile and install it if you wish. You can even sell it if you wish, you just can't call it RHEL. Nor can you call it Solaris, or Bamba, but you probably would not anyway. > You might find some relevant info on e.g. centos.org. They > keep writing there, tens of times, "a prominent North American > Enterprise Linux vendor" instead of RedHat, for this very reason. But > they did not change every occurence of RedHat in the sources themselves, > as far as I could see. They legally can't. They can remove the logo, splash screens, etc, but they can not remove any claims of authorship and copyright. The copyright notices are essential, without them there would be no GPL. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/ ================================================================= 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]
