Arthur Pemberton wrote: > In light of the small possiblity of Dell having Linux sold , en masse > on desktops and laptops, is Fedora prepared to make dell some kind of > mutally beneficial offer? Or is the Fedora community decidedly not for > the demographic of Dell buyers? Note that we have a Dell employee on the Fedora Project Board... http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MattDomsch . There have been a few questions asked on the Fedora Development list about what might be necessary. As I understand it, even without Fedora Project approval Dell would be allowed to install and sell whatever strict subset of Fedora they chose on their systems. (In other words, they don't have to install all the Fedora packages, but everything they install would have to come from Fedora RPMs). I imagine that if Dell wanted to add custom Dell branding (for example, to the Grub splash screen), something might be worked out -- it would be little different to the existing situation (currently we have Fedora-only branding there). If Dell wanted to provide custom packages to support their hardware, was prepared to take them through Fedora QA (so they got into Fedora repositories), and licensed them appropriately, there would certainly be no barrier to that -- there already is a lot of code in Fedora that has come from similar sources. "Appropriately", of course, would mean "a suitable Open Source or Free Software License", and that means that you would be allowed to use them on other manufacturers' hardware (or modify them to work on other manufacturers' hardware). The big potential problem I could see would be if Dell wanted to install closed-source software on their systems. I would expect and strongly hope that Fedora would *not* allow the use of their trademark under such situations -- it would be contrary to Fedora's Core Principles http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives. Under such circumstances, Dell could create their own Fedora-derived distribution (but not call it Fedora), or (much more likely) go to Ubuntu, SuSE or Linspire. James. -- E-mail: james@ | top! to bottom from or backwards read not do I, post top aprilcottage.co.uk | not do Please | -- Jeff Vian
