Fedora derivatives branding discussion

Stephen Krenzel sgk284 at gmail.com
Thu Apr 20 19:12:47 UTC 2006


When I think of "based on Fedora", to me that means that someone started off
with Fedora and modified it to get whatever they have. From a legal stand
point, that is blurry, but adding or subtracting packages should count. If
you leave "based on Fedora" distros to those which only use a subset of the
official packages, than you're really cutting out alot of people. I guess
you could argue that the people could just maintain the additional packages
in extras, but that isn't always the answer nor the best solution. If the
guidelines are as restrictive as proposed then we are not going to achieve
the desired effect. A lot of people make custom knoppix cd's with software
that isn't on the original knoppix CD, that's one of the benefits of being
able to do so, but they still claim that it is based off of knoppix. If you
want to see people pick up Fedora and start creating derivatives like crazy
(it's good PR), then the terms need to be more lenient. Yes, I know it is
horrible from a legal point of view, but this is what the community has come
to expect. The last thing we need is to throw the legal department at some
hobbyist who made a personal distro with OpenMosix or something that isn't
in Extras (not sure if OpenMosix is or isn't, just using it as an argument),
and he puts it up on his site for people to download and says "Hey I made
this custom CD that is based off of Fedora, but designed to set up an
OpenMosix cluster". According to the guidelines proposed, legal would have
to step in. It'd be horrible to the users, and to Fedora's image (I can see
the headlines on Slashdot now). I'm just saying that people should be able
to claim their work is based off of Fedora even if it includes non-fedora
packages.
-Steve

On 4/20/06, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 20:30 +0200, Rudolf Kastl wrote:
> > id have to remove all art and branding etc... ok...
> >
> > but then again calling it "derived of fedora" is legal? i am still
> > just curious... sorry for keeping on asking the same question. is only
> > "fork of fedora" legal then?
>
> IANAL, but as long as it isn't in the name of the product, or the logo
> of the product, I think in the documentation you can reference that it
> was built from or based on Fedora.
>
> --
> Jesse Keating RHCE      (geek.j2solutions.net)
> Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedoralegacy.org)
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