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Clarification on RedHat's Trademark Policies?
Hitch asks: "My
LUG's mailing list has had a thread for about a week now arguing about
Red Hat's policy which prohibits calling CD's burned from iso's
available on Red Hat's site 'Red Hat Linux' or including 'Red Hat' in
the name of the CD in any way. This includes things like 'Sombrero
Rojo' and 'Maroon Head Covering' according to some of their pages.
And according to some others, you cannot make a CD called 'My Linux'
with the line 'Contains Red Hat version X.X' in small print
underneath. We have, however, found another page that says precisely
the opposite, also on the Red Hat website. I was wondering what the
rest of the community's thoughts on this are, and perhaps since I know
Red Hat people read this, what the official word is. Primarily we're
concerned for Installfests, burning and handing out CD's to friends,
and things like CheapBytes. How does this affect them?"
According to a recent article on NewsForge, Red Hat has changed
their Trademark policy. Hopefully the new changes will make the
policy less confusing. What do you think about the new changes to
the policy?
But you can try pushing a different distribution at your installfests, and install something I feel's better, more standards compliant for building software from source, more easily upgradable, and doesn't mind cheapbytes selling cd's labeled with their name. I'm of course talking about Debian. I switched to Debian about 2 years ago, and haven't looked back since.
:)
Debian's a little harder to install currently, (that's improving more and more), but any halfway intelligent person should be able to install, by reading the available documentation, which I find quite nice. You just can't be afraid to read and try things. Plus there's always irc.debian.org channel #debian for any other questions you really can't figure out easily without reading through 50 pages of stuff.
One you get everything up and running, installing a new program is as simple as type "apt-get install abiword" or whatever new package you wish. Security issue just come out? 99% of the time you'll be patched by apt-get update && apt-get -u upgrade. You can even upgrade a box through apt-get to a newer debian version. Not more buying cd's again and reinstalling.
I know, I know, it's not really the answer to your question about RedHat licensing, but it does solve the problem, it just solves the problem my way. Which is what you get if you ask me a question.
Feel free to either agree or disagree with me, I don't care. Don't like my solution? Try someone else's, no hard feelings.