On 08/16/2013 03:12 PM, Andrew Wyatt wrote: > RedHat's trademarks are the only reason why you can't take the RedHat ISO > and distribute it to whomever you want. Not exactly. The aggregate collection, just because it contains GPL-licensed software, is not necessarily under the GPL as a whole, and the ISO itself is copyrighted. Further, out of the 2108 packages I have installed on one of my RHEL6 systems, 678 of them are not GPL-covered. And then there's: [root at www ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.4 (Santiago) [root at www ~]# rpm -q --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE} %{LICENSE}\n" redhat-logos redhat-logos-60.0.14-1.el6 Copyright 1999-2010 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. [root at www ~]# In other words, if you distribute an ISO, and that ISO contains the source code or binary code of redhat-logos, that's a copyright violation as no one but the copyright owner, Red Hat, Inc., has the right to distribute it. So you can't distribute that ISO due to both a copyright violation and a trademark violation. Now, GPL does specifically cover binaries; that's the whole of section 2. The last paragraph of section 2 I've already quoted, and that makes clear that RHEL the distribution, which is an aggregation of programs, some covered by GPL, some not, is not all covered by GPL just because it includes some GPL-covered programs. The case of redistributing an ISO containing the binary or source RPM of redhat-logos is clear; it's not freely redistributable. The cases of GPL-covered binary RPM's being redistributed has not been tested in court to the best of my knowledge. And I don't plan to become the test case. Of course, I am not a lawyer, and I reserve the right to be wrong. But it's clear that Red Hat has cleared their policies, contracts, licenses, and agreements with their own lawyers, and those lawyers know a great deal more about that than any of us (with at least the one notable exception of Russ) does. One of those lawyers is now the primary editor on groklaw.net...... I met him (Mark W.) in Asheville, and he's a nice guy, and he really is the expert on these things.