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

[Barry L. Kline]

Scott Sharkey wrote:

> They would really prefer that you cease operations, discontinue your 
> product, and force everyone to purchase their (overpriced) products. 
> Unfortunately, for them, the GPL prevents them from actually trying to 
> make that happen, so they resort to vague threats, and threats they know 
> are unenforceable (like restricting linking - which I seriously doubt 
> would hold up in any court anywhere, since they have "published" this 
> info into a public forum (the internet)).  They are hoping you will 
> think it's more trouble to comply, and fold your shop.

Actually, I just thought of one more thing.  Red Hat is constrained not 
only by the GPL, but by the US Legal system too.  We're bashing them for 
attempting to enforce their trademark when in actuality, they are 
required to do so by the legal system.

IANAL (thankfully) but IIRC, for one to maintain a copyright or 
trademark you must actively pursue anyone who infringes on it.  You lose 
your trademark protection if you go after someone who uses the trademark 
(say, Microsoft decides to release Red Hat Windows) and they can prove 
that you had not gone after others who had done the same.

So, like it or not, Red Hat has little choice.

On top of that, they are being good GPL citizens by releasing their SRC 
rpms -- which they are not required to do.  From what I understand of 
the GPL, they are required to release the source code of anything they 
build on top of GPL software.  But they are not required to make it 
relatively painless to generate a virtual clone of their product -- e.g. 
source RPMs.

If the only thing that CentOS has to do to satisfy RH legal is to remove 
the offending trademark infringements, then that's fine.  My only 
concern is their request to remove links.  There's a grey area that 
would require some discussion.

BK