summary of firstboot and EULA changes in Fedora 7

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 17, 2007, Max Spevack <mspevack at redhat.com> wrote:

> The compilation is made available under the GNU General Public
> License version 2.

I don't quite understand what this is supposed to mean.

Is it correct to assume that the legal implications of this move have
been run through legal, and that it is not in fact a problem to
release under the GPL a compilation that includes both software and
other kinds of copyrightable works, some of which are licensed under
licenses that are incompatible with the GPL?  And that this doesn't
amount to dual-licensing logos and trademarks that are AFAIK supposed
to be offered under the trademark policy only, not under the GPL?

If nothing else, some major clarification of what this means would be
in order, otherwise people might get impressions that they can do
things we don't mean them to do (like modifying non-Free firmware or
invariant sections of GFDL documents we ship, or using our logos and
trademarks without complying with the trademark policites).

> There are no restrictions of using, copying,

True AFAIK

> or modifying this code.

Not quite.  Even the most liberal Free Software licenses establish a
few restrictions on modifications you can make, such as not granting
permission to remove or modify the license and the copyright notices.
In particular, the GPLv2 itself does, so this statement is
inconsistent with the license in the paragraph before it.

> redistribution of the code, either in its original or a modified form.
> Among other things, those restrictions/obligations pertain to the
> licensing of the redistribution, trademark rights, and export control.

Some of these might also be in conflict with the license stated in the
paragraph before.

> Thus, firstboot no longer requires the user to *AGREE* to/with
> anything, merly to *ACKNOWLEDGE* having been presented with some
> information.

Excellent!

> COMMENTS -- the "anaconda-images" package no longer exists.  We've
> also removed the line "Merely deleting these files may corrupt the
> Software." because it is not applicable in a document like this.

And, if it's true, it would probably show that the combination is not
mere aggregation, and then say copyleft might apply to the trademarks
and logos, which AFAIK is not intended.


I hope this helps,

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}