[Gllug] Linuxemporium - Pink Tie

[John Winters]

On Wed, 2002-11-20 at 19:38, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-11-20 at 16:59, John Winters wrote:
> > Due to volume of e-mail I'm not currently subscribed to the GLLUG list
> > but Alain copied me on this.
> > 
> > There's been a lot of talk in this kind of vein but having investigated
> > it I don't believe it's correct.  An important point to note is that as
> > of 8.0, RH is *not* licensed under the GPL.  (Actually, it never was,
> > but in the past all the components provided by RH were GPL.  This is no
> > longer the case.)
> 
> I've been a upporter of RH for several years now - despite what others
> have said about them, they've always contributed more GPL'd software
> back to the pool, and have always made their distro easily available.
> I'm saddened to hear that this is no longer the case. Can you give a
> brief run down of the bits of 8 that aren't GPL?

It's just some pictures (and not even all occurences of said pictures). 
Very much a token gesture, which is why I advance the theory that
they've realised their previous claims about trademark law were
groundless.  It's a small (but irritating) modification to the images
but once you've done it the thing you have is not the thing that RH Inc
christened "Red Hat Linux" so they genuinely can stop you referring to
it as that.  Of course there's nothing to stop you calling it "Big Jim's
Linux" and then describing it as "derived from Red Hat Linux".


> Do they still fall under the "open-source" definition?

My belief is no.

> Is it still legal for me to make
> copies of downloaded ISO's for friends?

Yes - the licence on the relevant bits allows some kinds of
re-distribution.

> I assume the answer to the
> latter is yes, but does that mean the ISO's available from
> ftp.redhat.com have had some software removed?

No - they are the ones containing the affected bits.

John

-- 
The Linux Emporium - the source for Linux in the UK
See http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/

We had a woodhenge here once but it rotted.


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