[WBEL-devel] First Install of WBEL-Final

[Charles Lacour]

On Saturday 20 December 2003 14:31, Jason Dixon wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 15:27, Charles Lacour wrote:
> > Since it's supposed to be exactly like RHEL except for verbiage and
> > artwork, there's really only two things to report:
> >
> > * Artwork or text that might make it seem to someone that this
> > distribution comes from Red Hat
>
> Trademarks are bad, Copyrights are ok?

Very definitely. Remove one of Red Hat's copyrights, and they would have good 
reason to get upset.

And to clarify, we're not removing Red Hat's trademarks (which would be as 
illegal/inappropriate as removing their copyrights), we're removing their 
trademarked _images_.

To remove all the material copyrighted by Red Hat would mean taking out a LOT 
of patches, and would seriously disrupt the functionality. Since all their 
copyrighted material is licensed under the GPL (ok, all of it in RHEL 3, if 
you're picky), it's not necessary to do so.

Basically, Red Hat has not abandoned the open-source model, despite what it 
might look like at first. What their new license is telling the world is that 
you have to make a choice at the very beginning. If you want Red Hat's 
support (including up2date), pay them money first, then install RHEL.

If you DON'T want support, then use something else. You're perfectly welcome 
to use the code they used (as the GPL pretty much requires), but you can't 
CALL it Red Hat, and you can't do anything else to make people think it's Red 
Hat. 

All they actually require you to replace is the images in anaconda-images and 
redhat-logos that either say "Red Hat" somewhere in the image, or have their 
"Shadowman" logo.

The WBEL project has gone a great deal further than that, replacing many more 
images, but it is still restricting itself (mostly) to images.