[CentOS] RHEL on The Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc

Sat Mar 22 18:12:55 UTC 2008
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

centos at 911networks.com wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Mar 2008 07:50:26 +0100
> Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net> wrote:
> 
>> Mag Gam a écrit :
>>> Why would you download an illegal version of RHEL? I see no
> 
> There is no illegal version of RHEL. When you buy from RH, you
> are not buying RHEL, but support and updates for the particular
> version of RHEL that you paid for. Its the same for Novell and
> SuSE. 
>

This is not technically true ... but close :D

You can not redistribute the redhat-logos or redhat-artwork binary 
packages to others unless you are selling your media.  You also can not 
distribute those 2 source or binary RPMS without editing and removing 
the logos / trademark related things in them.  Since the ISOs in 
question on the Bittorrent sites distribute those files, they are 
illegal per Red Hat's trademark policies.

Now USING the RHEL discs (not distributing them to others, but 
installing on your own equipment) is a totally different story (and much 
more restrictive).  You may not install any RHEL packages that are 
provided by Red Hat on ANY machines that you have not purchased an 
entitlement for.  That means on test machines, production machines, 
whatever.  No entitlement, no install allowed.  It does not matter 
whether you want "Support" or not.

Red Hat has the right to audit your equipment for up to 1 year after 
your last license expires for compliance.

> Now, RH artwork [the hat...] and names are copyrighted, but that's
> it. You can legally download the full source code, which is what
> the CentOS team did. The CentOS team provides the support [through
> this mailing list] and the updates for free.

CentOS does provide everything you need to run an enterprise OS meeting 
all the upstream redistribution requirements, yes.

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