When to rebrand fedora?
Jeroen van Meeuwen
kanarip at kanarip.com
Thu Jul 31 14:36:40 UTC 2008
Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 09:48 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
>> Paul W. Frields wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 00:44 +0200, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
>> To me it doesn't make sense removing fedora-release from a downstream
>> distribution and then still say "based on Fedora" or "Fedora
>> derivative". This, in my opinion, should not be a requirement. I'd like
>> to enable people to do it anyway, with the click of a mouse, but it's
>> not that simple at this point.
>
> I wasn't sure of the complexity required to create such a solution.
>
It means building the foo-release RPM, which cannot simply be done with
a mouse-click (yet).
Some more complexity wrt rebranding is explained in one of my blog posts;
http://kanarip.livejournal.com/2222.html
and it's the top of the iceberg.
>> Taking this a little further, the trademark policy can simply not
>> require a downstream distribution to remove all occurrences of the
>> Fedora trademark (as a string) from the entire system. Although I'd like
>> to enable them to do so, it's simply not scalable to keep track of where
>> the Fedora name might occur in a package name, file name or file contents.
>
> Yes, I think this would be an onerous and extremely unworkable
> requirement too. I was only thinking of the case in derivative spins
> that use non-Fedora stuff, where we don't want users confused as to
> where they're going to get help. This discussion has been hashed over
> many times so there's no need to have it again here, I guess... :-) The
> new trademark guidelines (hopefully) will make it possible to allow a
> better connection to Fedora as the upstream but still make it clear that
> a distro is derived from Fedora and is not itself Fedora.
>
Yes, the "based on Fedora" use case, which I think could be implemented
from a technical point of view so that a derivative:
- may have fedora-release, but then needs to
$ sed -i -e 's/Fedora/Foo/g' /etc/fedora-release
and needs another package, foo-release, to install the additional
resources in terms of RPM-GPG keys and repository configuration.
== or ==
- does not use fedora-release and fully enables their foo-release to
have all the content needed.
>> Since we're on the topic, I've also suggested on the "new trademark
>> policy" wiki page[1], that rebranding should not be required in case you
>> hand out a presentation or demo in case of an ISV, if you have built it
>> upon Fedora and are simply handing it out to attendees of your session
>> (which kinda equals to limited distribution, e.g. non-public). Same
>> might apply to downstream vendors distributing appliances (like VMWare
>> used to distribute .vmx files for some operating systems/distributions?)
>>
>
> This part I'm not so sure of. "Limited distribution" in an age of
> convenient bit-moving doesn't mean a whole lot. Rather, we should be
> working on automation for rebranding that makes the whole operation easy
> for anyone that wants to do it -- so the requirement is less onerous.
>
Euh, right, "Limited distribution" is most definitely not the right
terminology, but I wouldn't want to force people (or ISVs for that
matter) that hand out Fedora media containing a demo or presentation, to
rebrand to the fullest because they add non-fedora content. Replacing
fedora-logos is reasonable, anything beyond makes them go to other
distributions to use or derive from.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip
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