[CentOS] Red Hat CEO: Go Ahead, Copy Our Software

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Fri Aug 16 17:42:35 UTC 2013


On 08/16/2013 01:12 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Really? Are none of the trademark-restricted additions packaged into 
> GPLed items? Or is redistributing the trademark OK as long as nothing 
> is changed? If you could obtain a copy and didn't care about RNH, 
> could you ship straight RH binaries instead of rebuilding?

You're free to grep through the license fields in the RPM database to 
find out, for those packages which contain trademarks.  I'm not going to 
do it for you.

If you only wanted a single shot at redistribution, and you didn't care 
about RHN, then you still can only redistribute binaries that have 
licenses that specifically permit binary redistribution, and only 
individual packages at that, since the ISO, as a collection, is a 
separate work (it's an 'aggregation of works' (an anthology, if you 
will)) for copyright purposes and could be under a completely different 
distribution-not-allowed license.  There are some licenses out there 
that could be argued to only cover the source and not the binary 
translation (GPL does specifically cover the object code and executable 
forms, IIRC).





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