[CentOS] New to CentOS, is this a safe bet?

[Alex White]

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Preston Crawford wrote:
| #1 - Is there any reason to fear Red Hat bringing the hammer down and
| thus ruining the party? I'd love to see an FAQ or something to the
| effect that legally there's no way for Red Hat to block what CentOS is
| doing.
|
| #2 - Is the community strong?
| Any responses that can help me decide are appreciated. Thanks.
|
| Preston

Concerning RedHat bringing the hammer down and ruining the party.
Redhat released the source (as an obligation to the GPL) for others
to compile as they see fit. This is done via SRPMS (which you are of
course familiar with). There is nothing in their language on the
site or Release Notes that prevents a person from downloading SRPMS
(as they are publicly available from RedHat) and compiling as you so
wish. RedHat does have legal grounds to ask you to remove their
trademarks though if you are building your own distribution from
their SRPMS. This tibbit of information can be found here:

http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/corp/trademark1.pdf

Note the language "As a licensee under the GPL and other applicable
licenses, you have the right to make changes to RedHat Linux
software and can market and distribute those changes according to
the terms of the license." in reference to building clones of their
distribution. They only ask you not call it Red Hat.

As to your second point, the community has been nothing but helpful
in my eyes. Questions are answered very quickly (at least in my
case) and they are typically spot on. If someone doesn't already
know the answer, usually you find they know where to point you.
There is a wonderful array of very knowledgeable people here.

HTH

- --
Alex White
prata at kuei-jin.org
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