[CentOS-devel] Question about generating a spin of CentOS 7

Jim Perrin jperrin at centos.org
Fri Oct 31 17:13:48 UTC 2014


Why does this feel like you're intentionally attempting to be difficult?

This has been posted for months at http://www.centos.org/legal/trademarks/

This is both for community protection (so that people using hosted
instances get what they think they're getting for example) and for our
protection as we've worked hard to establish the project.

This is bog-standard and not at all specific to centos. Our terms are
fairly comparable to pretty much every other large distribution. We're
not looking to interfere with normal sys-admin uses or even hosting
companies. We actively *want* people using our stuff.


What we don't want is some shady hosting company creating a terrible
knock-off copy and calling it CentOS, harming both their customers AND
our reputation with their modifications. This is entirely too common,
and has to be explained so frequently during any given week on irc that
the channel bot has triggers in place so the regulars like Manuel don't
have to type it out constantly.

On 10/31/2014 11:59 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 11:44 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Legalese is much worse than rocket science.  Where does a VM image fit
>>> in this scheme?  Can people build a VM image with an application
>>> installed for distribution and still identify the base system name?
>>> And if so, how/why is that different from any other copy?
>>>
>>
>> No, The CentOS team creates VMs and cloud images and distributes them.
>> Those are official.  Things created by someone else are not official.
>> This is for YOUR protection.
> 
> So all of the VMs out there with apps pre-installed should _not_
> mention the name of the base OS they use?
> 
>> You can give people CentOS ISOs and call that CentOS, you can use CentOS
>> to create 'Your Thing' and give that to people as 'Your Thing'.  You
>> can't call 'Your Thing' CentOS.  Why, because 'Your Thing' is not
>> actually CentOS. You can say 'Your Thing' is based on CentOS (if you
>> modified CentOS) .. or you can say 'Your Thing' runs on CentOS if you
>> distribute 'Your Thing' and an unmodified CentOS on the same media and
>> install it via a kickstart.
> 
> So even if the resulting copy is identical, there is a difference in
> what it should be called?  Or can you call it the same once it is
> done, just not the piece that does the installing?
> 

-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
twitter: @BitIntegrity | GPG Key: FA09AD77


More information about the CentOS-devel mailing list