Request for Trademark Approval (Fedora AOS Spin)

[Axel Thimm]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 09:02:40PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 23:57 -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
> > 
> > If they turn off all security and make 'honey pot linux - based on
> > fedora' as a livecd for catching would-be crackers, I have no problem
> > with that. It would be a good thing to have fedora's name on, I think.
> > 
> > If they put apt in place (and modify massive amounts of anaconda, etc,
> > to make it all work) then why not?
> > 
> > How does it hurt us?
> 
> You just said the magic words.  "Based on Fedora", which is not Fedora.
> I don't have a problem with people doing crazy ass things like taking
> out selinux, removing yum, or even replacing the entire runtime with our
> busybox, and calling it Based on Fedora.  It's when they call it Fedora
> that I get concerned.

I belive that if we think about why we want some derivatives to be
called Fedora and why some not, the basic line of thought is that if
it improves the brand name by having high quality standards, solving a
new problem niche nicely, or in general promotes the use of Fedora in
any way then it is in Fedora's interest to allow the use of the
trademarked name.

Currently I cannot imagine Fedora w/o rpm or yum, but I can imagine it
w/o selinux if I think about very small footprints, nano-Fedoras and
all the recent suggestion. I wouldn't mind my phone to advertise that
it runs on Fedora, even if selinux was turned off (but the high
standard of security is ensured in another way).

Since we can't envison what nice spins/derivatives people will come up
with (I first heard of the appliance spin), we should not statically
enforce any requirements, but instead have the board be the checking
instance like it is now.

A spin may fulfill all the formal requirements we can come up like a
minimal base etc and still be worthless compared to the standard
official spins (e.g. adding say xemacs to the package pool and calling
it the Fedora xemacs spin). Or it may violate some requirement we come
up (like selinux), but still be a very nice spin solving the security
issues differently - or maybe applied in an environment where some of
the requirements don't matter:

Consider a Fedora spin for some embedded devices that are not expected
to have network access (can't think of many, but say my fridge or my
car's injection system), will we deny BMW to call their spin Fedora
because they will not have selinux or yum? OR maybe even ripped all of
rpm and rpmdb of the final image to shrink it some more?

Anyway, what I want to say, is that we can't envision today how far
the Fedora spin success will go and setting barriers today that a
board in the future will need to tear down again, is maybe
counterproductive. After all we do have the people in the board
checking whether the spin is good enough to be called Fedora, and if
they don't like the absence of selinux on some spin they will not put
their stamp on it.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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