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.
PJ