On 08/16/2013 03:12 PM, Andrew Wyatt wrote:
> RedHat's trademarks are the only reason why you can't take the RedHat ISO
> and distribute it to whomever you want.
Not exactly. The aggregate collection, just because it contains
GPL-licensed software, is not necessarily under the GPL as a whole, and
the ISO itself is copyrighted.
Further, out of the 2108 packages I have installed on one of my RHEL6
systems, 678 of them are not GPL-covered.
And then there's:
[root@www ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.4 (Santiago)
[root@www ~]# rpm -q --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}
%{LICENSE}\n" redhat-logos
redhat-logos-60.0.14-1.el6 Copyright 1999-2010 Red Hat, Inc. All
rights reserved.
[root@www ~]#
In other words, if you distribute an ISO, and that ISO contains the
source code or binary code of redhat-logos, that's a copyright violation
as no one but the copyright owner, Red Hat, Inc., has the right to
distribute it. So you can't distribute that ISO due to both a copyright
violation and a trademark violation.
Now, GPL does specifically cover binaries; that's the whole of section
2. The last paragraph of section 2 I've already quoted, and that makes
clear that RHEL the distribution, which is an aggregation of programs,
some covered by GPL, some not, is not all covered by GPL just because it
includes some GPL-covered programs.
The case of redistributing an ISO containing the binary or source RPM of
redhat-logos is clear; it's not freely redistributable.
The cases of GPL-covered binary RPM's being redistributed has not been
tested in court to the best of my knowledge. And I don't plan to become
the test case.
Of course, I am not a lawyer, and I reserve the right to be wrong. But
it's clear that Red Hat has cleared their policies, contracts, licenses,
and agreements with their own lawyers, and those lawyers know a great
deal more about that than any of us (with at least the one notable
exception of Russ) does. One of those lawyers is now the primary editor
on groklaw.net...... I met him (Mark W.) in Asheville, and he's a nice
guy, and he really is the expert on these things.
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