[CentOS-devel] Trademarked content hunt

Tue Nov 23 16:15:26 UTC 2010
R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com>

I see a bug filing, done merely by looking for certain words, 
perhaps with find and grep on an exploded tree.  This is 
probably not helpful

The issue is NOT if a word form or file name containing the 
word fragments 'hat' and 'red' is present.  Rather it is if a 
formal TRADEMARK (as opposed to mere identification) of ANY 
other party, or non-free (i.e., copyrighted and not under a 
GPL [former approach] or CC [present approach] or other freely 
redistributable license) images are present

The mere 'use' of the word fragments when used as identifiers 
is not a problem -- if that file is under the GPL, etc, it is 
free for reuse without change; if it IS changed, or a 
derivative work produced from teh sources that generate that 
file, we need to be sensitive to maintaining the COPYING and 
copyright trail, so a 'light touch' and thoughtful changes, 
rather than simply running a 'sed' bulldozer through a 
srouce tree is in order

Turning to the upstream sources, Red Hat initially isolated 
this type of content to two packages:
     redhat-artwork
and the install time 'images' file for anaconda

In recent upstream product, I also see;
       redhat-logos

Over time, Fedora has acted to track down and get licenses 
cleaned up and reviewed, and we benefit from that effort

We at CentOS may WANT to alter a given piece of branding art, 
but please do not conflate what we must do with what is merely 
a potential 'want'

-- Russ herrold