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I'm not a lawyer, but I thought that if you wanted to keep your trademark you had to keep it from being used as a generic term. If third party apps must use the trademarked reference when they really want to test for a generic compatible OS, they've done something wrong. There was a time when the only way to get aspirin was to ask for a trademarked brand name...
The applications only want to support the actual Prominent North American... or what ever we should call them.
Some applications might want to do that, but others may not. If the description always said XXX brand of YYY where YYY was a generic term then they could tell they had what they wanted either way.
As Johnny said, we've been asked not to use certain trademarked items, and I don't really see any reason to go against that right now whether or not we're "technically" correct in doing so. There are plenty of other "open source" distributions like mandriva and suse, where rebuilding the corporate or EL version is nearly impossible, if not outright prohibited by the license agreement. RH supports the community as much as anyone else, and we do use their source packages, so if they say "we'd appreciate you not doing that" it's a reasonable thing. Add 2-3 lines of text manually, or bite the hand that feeds you. Not really a tough call for me.
-- Jim Perrin System Architect - UIT Ft Gordon & US Army Signal Center