[CentOS] Vote For CentOS :)

[Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

From: me at prestoncrawford.com
> I'm not confused. I think the point is (and this has seemingly
> been a persistent issue since the RHEL rebuilds appeared on the
> scene)

Blame US Trademark Law then.

> that Red Hat puts licensing restrictions on GPL software.

Red Hat does not put any restriction on your use of their trademarks
internally.  But due to US Trademark Law, Red Hat cannot let you
publicly redistribute anything "Red Hat(R)" in a way that would allow
a judge to rule Red Hat allows free redistribution of their trademark
without a license.

Furthermore, please point me to the section where the GPL says I
have the right to binaries and other package distributions of GPL
software?  It only says I have a right to any GPL source code, and
any required source code (which is then also GPL) for the software
to function under no other terms than GPL.

> And that strikes many of us as odd.

What is odd to me is that people see this as a Red Hat-only issue.
Not only is Trademark Law really a PITA for Red Hat, but Trademark
Laws in other countries -- notably Germany -- is why SuSE's hand
has been forced even more.

[ E.g., does anyone remember the KIllustrator name change?
It wasn't Adobe's doing at all! ]

And most don't stop to read the GPL, and what it's real terms are.

If I sell GPL software, I do _not_ have to put the source code on
my site.  In fact, Red Hat could choose to _only_ distribute the
GPL source code on CDs or -- better yet, do what SuSE does --
and say the GPL source code is available in Fedora Core.

Let me say that again, Red Hat doesn't even need to offer SRPMS.
They could just plunk out the "raw" source code, or just point to
Fedora Core -- or maybe just the few SRPMS (like the kernel) that
differ -- and make it 100x more difficult for distros like CentOS to
exist!

That's _exactly_ what SuSE does with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server
(SLES).  And many other distros are similar -- they have their
"redistributable" source packages for their "redistributable" version,
and then _none_ for their non-redistributable version.

Red Hat doesn't play such games.  They put out source packages
for _both_ Fedora Core _and_ RHEL -- so there are no questions.



--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org