On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Bart Schaefer wrote:
Content-Type=message/rfc822 Content-Description=embedded message Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 02:05:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bart Schaefer schaefer+centos@zanshin.com
To: kevin kwood@free.fr Cc: centos@caosity.org Subject: Re: [Centos] Diff files to be made publicly available.
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, kevin wrote:
However, can someone please explain the following line from redhat-logos.spec in CentOS 3.1 SRPMS:
License: GPL - CentOS logos Copyright 2003 and Trademark Definitive Software Ltd
I hope CentOS is 100% GPL, open source software, free for all men (and women) to copy and distribute at a small cost
Copyright is not license.
Okay.
Materials can be *licensed* under the GPL, and therefore freely copied, even when copyrighted. In fact, the entire basis of the GPL, as I understand it (IANAL etc. etc.) is copyright law -- someone has to hold a copyright on the material in order to have legal grounds for applying the GPL. If no one holds a copyright, then the material is in the public domain and the GPL is neither necessary nor applicable.
It is true that in many cases the copyright of GPL'd material is assigned to the FSF or some similar entity, but that is not a necessary condition of licensing it under the GPL.
*IF* there were a statement somewhere that explicitly *excludes* these images or other selected parts of CentOS from the terms of the GPL, then you might have grounds for complaint, but the statement that they are copyrighted does not AFAIK constitute such an exclusion.
I have no reason to complain about the work done on CentOS 3.1. Its a necessary direction due to Red Hats chosen path.
The effect of the copyright is that you cannot separate the CentOS logos from the rest of the sources and use them, independently, for some other purpose, without permission from Definitive Software Ltd. The effect of the GPL is that you can copy and distribute CentOS as a whole, even though it includes the copyrighted images. Do you see the distinction?
Okay imagine I have removed the images from CentOS 3.1 and replaced them with other images I created, or with no copyright restriction.
Are there any other copyrighted parts to CentOS 3.1? Is some of the code copyrighted also?
(Again, I am not a lawyer, and the GPL has all sorts of other effects that might be construed to make it possible to re-use the logos.)
Thanks for the clear response.
Kevin Wood. Looking for truth and clarity nothing more..... but if you throw in a bonus, thats fine with me.
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, kevin wrote:
Are there any other copyrighted parts to CentOS 3.1?
Of course. As I mentioned, most FSF software such as Emacs is copyright by the Free Software Foundation.
I know for a fact that the zsh sources are copyright by various individual contributors because the "Zsh Development Group" is not a legal entity for copyright purposes. In fact, zsh isn't even distributed under the GPL, it has its own license.
Similarly the apache http server and most of its components use the Apache Foundation's license, not the GPL, and nearly everything related to Perl is available under the "Artistic License" as well as the GPL.
Is some of the code copyrighted also?
Have I answered that? Or do you mean the actual kernel source? I haven't looked through the latter recently, but I imagine there are copyrighted bits.
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Bart Schaefer -
kevin