[WBEL-devel] An "Issue" with WBEL (pun intended)

[Simon J Mudd]

grwm@gnuleaf.net (g whitley mott) writes:

> On Sat, 2003-12-13 at 10:52, Simon J Mudd wrote:
> > It would be better IMO that the redhat-release package mimicked the RH
> 
> unfortunately the Red Hat in /etc/redhat-release is a trademark, and has
> to go, for whitebox to avoid legal problems.

What exactly is the "trademark". The name? The fact that we call the
system RedHat Enterprise Linux (It doesn't)?

Having a package named redhat-release whose content says RedHat.... is
a trademark infringement? I don't think so. It's too easy to write an
rpm that does that.  Having /etc/issue saying that it is RHEL may be a
problem, unless underneath it says that the package(s) is/are modified
from the orginal sources....  Having a file called /etc/redhat-release
has the same problem?

i don't know. What is true is that we can't pretend that the OS is the
same thing as RHEL, but the white box website doesn't try to pretend
that.  It's also clear that the origin of WBL is RHEL.

Why have people looked at WBL and not Mandrake or something similar? i
think simply because they want a RH compatible OS at a cheaper price
and that only holds if WBL is close to indistinguishable from RHEL.

Perhaps my ideas here are flawed or others on this list have a
different point of view.

In any case forking another OS from RHEL just makes it more difficult
for application developers to build packages which install without
problems.

I've had a hardtime trying to support a Postfix RPM on different
various versions of RedHat, Yellowdog and Mandrake Linuxes and white
yes compiling from source solves all problems, a lot of people find it
convenient to install a pre-built binary package.  If you have to do
different things so it works on WBL it just won't get done.

Maybe one day I want to put Oracle on WBL or Sybase or another
commercial product and it would be nice to know that I can just
install it without worrying.  (Support is a different issue but on a
home machine this may not be an important issue.)

Simon