On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote: > 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. > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > Well look at that, TIL about the redhat logos package. Even if they couldn't copyright the ISO itself (though I think you are probably right that they can), since it contains a non-GPL logos package that's also protected under trademark law it's effectively illegal to redistribute on multiple fronts.