[SGVLUG] FC repository searches

[Dustin Laurence]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 01:26:47PM -0700, Michael Proctor-Smith wrote:
> 
> the cheapCDs type people. But the thing about trademark is that if
> they do not protect it they lose it. So if they let people go around
> saying this is RHEL they lose there ability to stop other poeple from
> claiming there product is RHEL, for commerial perposes.

I agree, but I tried to make it clear that as far as I could tell that
was *not* the point.  As best I could make out they prevented the
rebuilders from telling the truth, which is that they are rebuilds from
the RHEL source RPMs.  I believe it is also their legal right to say
that much.

You don't get your rights if you can't pay for them, that is normal in
the business world, but in our world telling the truth about the
technology is mandatory.  To the degree that RH did that, they betrayed
us.

Let's check.  Hmm.  It's ambiguous.  CentOS's pages are as I describe,
scrupulously avoiding even the mention of their upstream:

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=3

Essentially they did 's/Red Hat/prominent North American Linux vendor/g'
on their entire web site.  The only place I saw that you could deduce
the source without outside knowledge is

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=2

which does not name the source exactly but does list the link to the
source RPMs at redhat.com.  As an amusing aside, apparently Sun donated
some hardware.  I wonder if that is related to the anti-Red Hat rhetoric
they used to produce? :-)

Wikipedia mentions the issue as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_clones

However, it's possible that RH only went after CentOS, because the
WhiteBox site appears a bit different:

http://whiteboxlinux.org/

They make it clear that it *is* a RH rebuild.  There are an enormous
amount of weasel words surrounding the string "Red Hat" however, so
perhaps the issue was that they got a high enough disclaimer density to
call off RH's dogs.  The level of disclaimers is actually quite bad, but
that perhaps is only a reflection of the slavery we've sold ourselves
into as a society and not a lot more than that.

Dustin
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