[CentOS] I have RHel6. How does that turn into Centos 6?

Paul Johnson

pauljohn32 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 29 16:17:23 UTC 2011


The bickering here about Centos 6 has made me wonder what is actually
legally necessary to re-distribute the RPM files that come with RHel6.

I am not starting a flame ware, I hope.  I'm just curious about what
is minimally necessary go from RHel6 to another distribution. I
suppose we could discuss "Paul Linux 6" instead of Centos, if that
makes you feel more comfortable. (and not too OT)

Suppose I dump out all of the SRPM packages and do a global find and
search to change the characters "RedHat" to "Paul".  What else would I
have to do?

Which of the RPM files in RH6 have "proprietary" software in them?
Those cannot be re-distributed as is? I figure there must be
something, because I installed the test version of SL6 back in January
and it locked up in disk recognition, whereas RH6 did not. So the Rhel
6 folks know some secrets stuff.

So, obviously, to create Centos 6, oops, Paul Linux 6,  I have to
isolate the non-GPL software and then replace it with something
workable.

After that, what am I legally required to do?  As far as all of the
other RPM packages are concerned, couldn't they be redistributed
exactly as they are, without any modification at all? In Centos-devel,
it appears to me most of the discussion is about "re-branding", going
through the packages and changing "RedHat" to "Centos" and swapping
out icons.

Is that legally necessary?  In my memory, there was a Linux distro
called Mandrake and it was exactly the same as RH for i386, except
they re-compiled with gcc options for i686.  I recall that in many of
the RPM packages in Mandrake, they did not bother to replace "RedHat"
with some other name.


PJ
-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas



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