[Centos] Red Hat Legal Targets www.centos.org website content

Benjamin J. Weiss benjamin at birdvet.org
Mon Feb 14 12:59:11 UTC 2005


Paul wrote:

>On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 20:46 -0700, Greg Knaddison wrote:
>  
>
>>On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 02:06:30 -0800, Francois Caen <frcaen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 03:33:24 -0500, Forrest Samuels
>>><forrest at liquidcs.com> wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>Does this also mean you can't link to the location where you get the source
>>>>to build CentOS? Can you still link to Red Hat's Errata pages?
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>The answer to that is in the letter:
>>>
>>>"Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our
>>>client's web site without permission. "
>>>
>>>Which is ludicrous.
>>>
>>>And would have a funny side effect: if nobody linked to RH, they would
>>>disappear from Google  :)
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>I imagine that RedHat has given permission to the search engines and
>>media and...everyone who they feel helps them by linking.
>>
>>Though I agree, it is counter to the way that the web has grown.
>>    
>>
>
>Actually since Google works based on the number of sites linking to you
>it would effect their ratings.
>
>  
>
Not necessarily.  The large corporations pay the search engines to 
ensure that they come up higher on the response lists.

I understand that RedHat is trying to protect their income.  After all, 
why pay for RHEL if CentOS is free?  I basically have two questions that 
I need to find a good IP attorney to clarify for me:

1) If CentOS is, in fact, a re-compile clone of RHEL with RH's 
permission (as per the GPL), then how can they legally require that 
CentOS not disclose that fact?
2) Is it legal to restrict others from linking to your website?

I think RH's going a bit overboard, as there really was no confusion as 
to whether or not RH was supporting CentOS.

Ben



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