[WBEL-devel] Long- Thoughts on WB maintenance (was Re: How to get the RHEL Errata?)

[John Morris]

On Thu, 27 Nov 2003, donavan nelson wrote:

> I'm under the general impression that John is interested in cleaning the
> packages a bit more than what Redhat requires.  This includes removed any
> redhat fedora's in WBEL.

Exactly.  I don't want any confusion.

> >From what I can see, he's generally gotten rid of everything redhat (except
> the admin tools redhat-config-* and packages named with redhat).  There is the
> issues of the Redhat license agreements on the CD's and the RedHat directory.
>  I haven't seen these addressed.

This point is addressed on the website, but basically it is a difference
between removing any incorrect claim that WB is produced by Red Hat and
trying to claim credit for a specific piece of software written by Red
Hat.  I could no more claim that redhat-config-network is mine than I
could morally rub mozilla.org's name off and call it the White Box Web
Browser.  Unless of course Mozilla.org made changing the name a
precondition to redistribution.  The rule of thumb I use is simple.  If it 
had came from SUSE or Mandrake, would RedHat change the name if they 
adopted it.

Which is of course why the distributors slap their name on their tools.  
Because were Mandrake to take redhat-config-* they would be morally
obligated to keep the name and they just couldn't bring themselves to do
it.  Which is a neat trick, release the code under the GPL named in such a
way that no major competitor will want to use it.  Remember how much
grumbling the name RPM got, especially when it was being considered as the
LSB standard packaging method?

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
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