Re: [Fsfe-uk] GPLv3 last days for comment, and other news links

[Jason Clifford]

On Sat, 16 Jun 2007, Jon Grant wrote:

> Going back to Red Hat distro. CentOS highlighted to me a while ago that
> as well has having to remove the Red Hat log from packages, they are not
> allowed to remove the logo from the Red Hat documentation created under
> the OPL!

So what? That's a simply matter of using grep to replace the logos and 
references to RH during the building of the RPMs and then only on a small 
number of them.

I have experience of this myself. I produced a RH deried distro from 1997 
to 1999 and it is not hard to do this - in fact it is a lot easier now as 
RH put the branding into specific packages so as to make it easier for 
derived distros to rebrand.

> CentOS told me it took them 3 months for CentOS-3 beta, and another 3
> months for the real release. CentOS 4 took about 6 weeks. So it does
> seem more than trivial to de-brand a distro before you are allowed to
> redistribute it.

Those are meaningless measurements without knowing 3 months from when. The 
only value that really indicates whether it is a problem is how long after 
RH officially release they are able to follow with their own version.

Checking I see that RH announced the release of version 5 on March and 
Centos did their release on April 12th. That doesn't say how much of those 
4 weeks delay was down to rebranding and how much was down to rebuilding 
and testing all the packages in the final build and getting it distributed 
to the download sites before the release was announced.

Jason
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