Understanding GPL: was...What price do you want?

Buck RHList at towncorp.net
Fri Sep 26 20:14:39 UTC 2003


Thank you very much :)

Buck

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-admin at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-admin at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Stephen Smoogen
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 3:56 PM
To: fedora-list at redhat.com
Subject: RE: Understanding GPL: was...What price do you want?


On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 13:39, Buck wrote:
> Thank you, Stephen, for your reply.
> 
>      Begin Quote:
> > 
> > You mixed in the Red Hat logos and other trademarks.  From what I
> > understand, I can copy, sell, or otherwise distribute Red Hat Linux
9.
> 
> > Is this correct?  Does not GPL give me that right?  RHL includes 
> > logos
> 
> > etc.
> 
> No you can not sell the product as Red Hat Linux 9. You can give it 
> away without changes but if you sell it you must rename it something 
> like PinkTie Linux etc. This is a minimal requirement to keep the 
> trademark under international trademark law.
> 
>      End Quote
> 
> I can't speak for 9, but earlier versions of Red Hat have been copied 
> and sold as Red Hat Linux CD-ROMs only for years.  I have quite a 
> collection of them myself beginning with 6.something.  (I just looked 
> for them and see I have an old 6.0 on a cdr with a paper label that I 
> purchased on EBay years ago.)

The difference between a small private company (Red Hat Linux 6.x) and a
publically traded company (Red Hat Linux 7.x). The internal lawyers and
external lawyers said that it needed to be clarified and worked on very
hard. There the Red Hat license package was added to the distribution
which helped clarify and enforce the trademarks.

> 
> I was not referring to changing the code on the RH 9 Disks, just 
> literally burning the ISOs and selling the disk as the Red Hat Linux 
> on CD-ROM only.  I understand that if I change the logos I could call 
> it PinkTie and sell it as my own product.

The understanding is that you have to change the LOGOs and call it
something other than Red Hat. To call it Red Hat causes 'confusion in
the marketplace'. I worked in Red Hat support and before 7.x about 2/3
of our unsupported tickets were from people who had bought unofficial
Red Hat copies and thought they had the right to support etc that an
official boxed set had. Didnt matter if the CDrom looked completely
different or said 'NO SUPPORT' in large letters. The name was associated
with the company and people thought we had something to do with it.

-- 
Stephen John Smoogen		smoogen at lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Labrador  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 4-0645 (note new #)
Ta-03 SM-1498 MailStop B255 DP 10S  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --


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