[CentOS] I have RHel6. How does that turn into Centos 6?

Fri Apr 29 19:44:21 UTC 2011
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

On 04/29/2011 12:26 PM, Todd Rinaldo wrote:
> 
> On Apr 29, 2011, at 11:43 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> 
>> On 04/29/2011 11:17 AM, Paul Johnson wrote:
>>> The bickering here about Centos 6 has made me wonder what is actually
>>> legally necessary to re-distribute the RPM files that come with RHel6.
>>>
>>> I am not starting a flame ware, I hope.  I'm just curious about what
>>> is minimally necessary go from RHel6 to another distribution. I
>>> suppose we could discuss "Paul Linux 6" instead of Centos, if that
>>> makes you feel more comfortable. (and not too OT)
>>>
>>> Suppose I dump out all of the SRPM packages and do a global find and
>>> search to change the characters "RedHat" to "Paul".  What else would I
>>> have to do?
>>>
>>> Which of the RPM files in RH6 have "proprietary" software in them?
>>> Those cannot be re-distributed as is? I figure there must be
>>> something, because I installed the test version of SL6 back in January
>>> and it locked up in disk recognition, whereas RH6 did not. So the Rhel
>>> 6 folks know some secrets stuff.
>>>
>>> So, obviously, to create Centos 6, oops, Paul Linux 6,  I have to
>>> isolate the non-GPL software and then replace it with something
>>> workable.
>>>
>>> After that, what am I legally required to do?  As far as all of the
>>> other RPM packages are concerned, couldn't they be redistributed
>>> exactly as they are, without any modification at all? In Centos-devel,
>>> it appears to me most of the discussion is about "re-branding", going
>>> through the packages and changing "RedHat" to "Centos" and swapping
>>> out icons.
>>>
>>> Is that legally necessary?  In my memory, there was a Linux distro
>>> called Mandrake and it was exactly the same as RH for i386, except
>>> they re-compiled with gcc options for i686.  I recall that in many of
>>> the RPM packages in Mandrake, they did not bother to replace "RedHat"
>>> with some other name.
>>
>> This is not the PAUL Linux mailing list.  It is the CentOS mailing list.
>>
>> The CentOS project will not redistribute files signed by Red Hat, and we
>> will not sign files that we do not create.  Simple as that.
>>
>> You also must make a "good faith effort" to not distribute any branding
>> that makes your version of Linux tell people that it is Red Hat Linux or
>> Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
> 
> I've always been surprised that CentOS ships /etc/redhat-release given
> the above paragraph.

redhat-release is hard coded into several of the files.

For the record, redhat (in lower case, and use for things like
redhat-release, redhat-config-network, etc. is not the trade mark and is
something they decided to name their packages.  "Red Hat" is the
trademark.  You will notice that in EL6, the directory on the ISOs is
Packages and not RedHat ... and things are named system-config-network
and not redhat-config-network (that started in centos4).

The critical part is that you take away things that say "This is Red Hat
Enterprise Linux".  But you do not want to take away "credit for work"
where it is attributed.

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