Re: Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Thomas Dodd <ted cypress com>]

Otto Haliburton wrote:

> > One of the reasons would be trademark law.  If free
> > distribution of things with the Red Hat name and logo
> > were allowed, the trademark would be invalid very
> > quickly ... ;)

> I think that's what I said in the previous email.  They can't license and
> patent a product that is freely distributed and their profit has been is in
> support of the open source product and that has created a high degree of
> instability for a commercial product.

No it's not. And once again you talk of licening and patents. Total 
unrelated to trademark law. Don't confuse copyright, trademark, and 
patent laws.

Once again RHEL is an open source product (at least mostly). Red Hat can 
not prevent you from redistributing it (GPL/BSD and other open liscense 
parts at least). Now if you excersice you rights under those liscenses, 
Red Hat is free to revoke you liscense for RHN service.

Read the liscens agreement for RHEL/RHN. If you violate the terms (like 
not having all machines registered) Red Hat's recourse it to nolonger 
allow access to RHN and other support.

	-Thomas