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Red Hat & Centos On Name Usage
Mister Incognito writes "As you probably know, Centos is a free distribution compiled from sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As requested, the distro has any references to Red Hat removed. But now Red Hat has decided that Centos must not even mention their name on the web site, or link to Red Hat, or even use metatags with its name on it. " Well, actually, what RHAT has asked for is that Centos comply with the their terms for using the name; Matthew Szulik has talked about this before, and should be noted that not all of the copyright stuff is "bad."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I am on the WhiteBox list, and there has been some discussion of the CentOS letter.
WhiteBox has not been contacted by the RH legal folks, and they may be in better compliance.
It would, if whitebox wasn't dead already.
CentOS formed because whitebox stagnated. On the plus side, it only takes like 5 minutes to "convert" your whitebox to CentOS, just change your apt or yum sources.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Mandrakesoft is in France. Centos is in the US.
This all seems pretty much irrelevant to me. Red Hat's business model for its Enterprise Linux is not selling the software as-is: this simply does not make (very much) financial sense, as the software is mostly given away for free by the creators. This is why Red Hat made the decision to split their product line in two and give away Fedora for free.
The business model for RHEL is selling support: if anything goes wrong with the product you can simply call in Red Hat and get them to fix it, without potentially wasting time or money on employing your own linux admin staff. So I don't see why Red Hat is so bothered about this when CentOS doesn't provide the support they do, and when they'd already removed most of the Red Hat references from their web site.
One good turn - gets all the covers.
It is perfectly acceptable to even change the main trading name of Centos to "RedHat-based Centos" as this is descriptive; they would not be claiming when selling the product that it is RedHat, but just Redhat-based.
In summary, if RHAT are claiming a trademark violation for this stuff, they can take a hike.
IANALOEAUSC.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
The BSD license that offers the greatest freedom IMHO, even states this (from BSD Template):
"Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."
This was the first name of the RPM, now I guess they changed to "RPM Package Manager". Following the buzz arround recurrent names.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Ironic that Red Hat seems to miffed about people using their name. They're not so bothered that they stole The Fedora Project's name when they changed the name of their 'home' distro. Red Hat proceeded to apply for a trademark on the name which would preclude the name being used by the Feodra Project which predates their trademark application by a number of years.
Read the Fedora Project's statement here.
A trademark registration only stops others from using the mark as a trade mark (i.e.: the name they use to trade/sell their product under) so this doesn't cover stuff in the software (that's why Mozilla can't sue Microsoft over MSIE's HTTP UA product token for instance).
It is perfectly acceptable to even change the main trading name of Centos to "RedHat-based Centos" as this is descriptive; they would not be claiming when selling the product that it is RedHat, but just Redhat-based.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
whitebox has quit. They have a plan to migrate
users to Cent OS and the main developer of whitebox is now working on Cent OS.
I build linux clusters and compute farms for biotech and pharma customers.
Redhat is often required due to the demands of certain commercial scientific software.
We need distros like Centos and Tao because we need a stable OS that has a multi-year lifespan. As others mentioned -- an every-6-months upgrade for Fedora Linux is not cool when you have production systems doing heavy science 24/7.
If Redhat had a sane pricing model for scientific computing I'd gladly pay for it. As it stands though their cheapest WS line is for low end X86 systems. If you have a cluster of opterons or boxes with more than 4GB RAM (very common) you are forced to go with the enterprise line which costs thousands of dollars per machine each and every year. This is not feasable even for enterprise customers (unless they have a site license with Redhat).
This is why over the past year or two I've started deploying clusters based on Suse and Centos.
my $.02
Exactly WHERE in the Red Hat TOS does making linking to redhat.com wrong? I read it. Apparently there's no such rule.
The only mentions of RedHat on their site from what I remember was just to stat that they were based off of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and not affiliated with them.
... they stated what they were and gave credit for the initial work. Most project would have raised a major fuss if they had not done that!!
So as far as I can see they were not doing anything wrong
Deep linking is perfectly legal.
Looks like Red Hat's plans are going straight down the toilet.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Except that there are no more "free" copies of current RedHat, and I'm pretty sure the older distributions no longer have support, right?
Karnal
Because you want to run Oracle software, and Oracle software is only certified on RHEL and SuSE enterprise server.
I know developers who want to install Oracle at home to learn about using it, i know dba's who want to install it to learn about the new features of the RDBMS.
Right now if you want to do that, you'd have to buy RHEL. If oracle would test against fedora or something similar, i wouldn't need CentOS.
Ultimately they are extremely accurate as "clones" because there is essentially very little change between the RHEL releases and the clones. RedHat are legally required to release the source code to everything they release under the GPL (which is virtually everything). The clone distros then take the source RPMs from the RH servers, strip out all the trademarked text and graphics, and compile it for use with other distributions.
I personally have been using CentOS on around a dozen servers for 6 months or so now, serving mail, DNS and various other services to thousands of people, and have never had any issue whatsoever with it. With the exception of the logos and name, it is identical to working with RHEL, so it is no problem to work with. All updates can be done quickly and easily, either through up2date or yum, and it is rock solid.
As you might imagine, our single-CPU web server is taking quite a beating at the moment. We took the site down briefly to tune some things, and it's back up for the moment, but we're working with several potential resources to post static copies of the linked pages in case the situation worsens again.
Please bear with us.
Michael Jennings
Technical Lead, cAos Linux
The cAos Foundation (http://www.caosity.org/)
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
You've obviously never used Red Hat or have never been in a position to have to admin hundreds or thousands of machines. Red Hat offers a really good product, it is priced cheaper then any of the competition, by far (look at Suse's support pricing options for enterprise, and Microsoft's per incident or 5-pack incident pricing). Red Hat's support is honestly the best I've ever experienced and they contribute more to the kernel then any other source so their products tend to work and integrate really well. Perhaps people should start looking into things before speaking, rather then listening to what the slahbots have to say.
Regards,
Steve
the white box site is http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/ run by John Morris
someone else wanted to be a co-developer and registered http://www.whiteboxlinux.net/ on their own initiative.
That second person who invited themselves to the party was rebuffed by Morris, who did not want to share control, and has moved to CentOS He was NOT the "main developer".
The original (one-person-run) whiteboxlinux show continues unchanged.
I would like to clarify the position of the cAos Foundation, of which CentOS is a project, on the web site matter.
First, I'll refer to the following summary (taken from this post):
First let me say that I appreciate your feedback and your candor.
Your comments are well received.
However, the situation as it currently stands is that we do not have
legal counsel to advise us on what we can or cannot say on our web
site, nor do we have the financial resources to pay for such.
Furthermore, RedHat is required by law to protect their trademarks or
risk losing them, and they do have valid concerns about trademark
dilution.
RedHat has always been very generous with their code and open with
their processes and resources. I would point out that their primary
competition in the commercial RPM-based distribution space is not
nearly as generous or cooperative. While we may not agree with
everything they have said, we have an obligation to respect their
trademarks and their role in helping to create what we are and what
CentOS is.
The bottom line is this: The references to Red Hat and any other
marks they own MUST be removed from the web site and will remain so
indefinitely. We want to be clear about what CentOS is and what it
offers, but until we can secure legal counsel to help us balance our
interests with those of RedHat and other companies in this space, we
must err on the side of caution. That means if we're not sure we can
say it, we don't say it.
This course of action, while perhaps not the ideal solution from a
purely Libertarian point of view, is correct and in the best interests
of the project and the community at this time. We gain nothing by
hurting, diluting, or pissing off RedHat, nor would we want to. And
we certainly gain nothing turning this into a big legal fiasco.
Please understand that this is right and necessary at this point in
time, and support Donavan and the rest of the CentOS team in following
through on what we've asked of them.
Second, I want to reiterate that the RH legal team has been extremely patient and helpful. They pointed out a number of legitimate concerns, and we continue to work with them to make sure our web site is in compliance with their trademark usage policies.
Third, as we (and our projects) continue to grow and develop, we will be in need of legal counsel. If you are willing to provide pro bono legal advice to the Foundation and its member projects, please contact us (legal ~a~t~ caosity ~d~o~t~ org).
And finally, I would like to point out that projects like CentOS could not exist without the continued support of RedHat, and we thank them for their continued efforts to find the right balance between running a for-profit business and helping the non-profit community.
Regards,
Michael Jennings
The cAos Foundation
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
If the ISP claimed to run RHEL but really run CentOS, then they are fraudulently representing to you that they have Red Hat support available to quickly fix any problems, and they don't.
CentOS is not just "like" RedHat - it literally *IS* RedHat Linux! Same sources, same compile tree.
/ONLY/ thing different is the manufacturing date! (compile time)
The
Can you imagine the SHITFIT that Coca-Cola would have if there was a competing product called "Co-sola - Coca-Cola derived soda"??? I mean, artificial diamond production would quintuple overnight, and the Men's Wearhouse would have a run on all the suits needed to cover all the lawyers' bodies involved...
RedHat is being very, very good about this. And it's a good thing, too - RedHat would lose all future business from me (and very nearly did with their RHL -> Fedora switcharoo) if they did anything to actually stop CentOS or WhiteBox.
But, the name is theirs, and they have every right and responsibiltiy to protect it as legally required.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
OpenSolaris might be a ways away. But if you want an enterprise proven stable OS, that you don't have to pay for Solaris 10 is distributed freely, even though it's not open source. It's what most people would want. It's provided for use at no cost. Most people don't care about having the source.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Sometimes it is referred to as RedHat, without a space between the Red & Hat.
I think you might want to get informed legal counsel concerning the GPL's impact of trademarks. The only court case to date to touch on this issue, seems to imply that the GPL is NOT a trademark license and that the clause you quote is confined inside the scope of copyright law.. and has no bearing on trademarks at all.
. ht m
http://www.open-mag.com/features/Vol_24/GPL/gpl
Trademarks are distinct legal constructions from copyrights and the GPL makes no specific mention of trademarks at all. It's probably not wise to assume that the GPL covers anything regard trademarks what-so-ever.