OT: Media format patents and commercial installations

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Fri May 26 14:29:40 UTC 2006


On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 09:21 -0500, Matt Domsch wrote:
> This would be pretty onerous on OEMs.  Keep all materials referring to
> their products that mention Fedora up-to-date with a list of
> (changing) add-ons?  This week the OEM has to add a driver for a new
> sound card that isn't in the Fedora kernel yet, next week they need a
> fix in the net-snmp package that isn't upstream yet, week after that
> they sign a marketing deal to include some other non-Fedora-provided
> package in their bundle, ...
> 
> IMHO, it's Fedora until it's sufficiently changed to not be Fedora.  A
> few relatively minor package substitutions (for hardware features or
> bug fixes) or additions that don't cause the OS from being
> recognizable as Fedora, should be allowed.  How to define that crisply
> legally I can't specify, IANAL. 

It is really not that hard to keep track of what is being modified.
When all modifications are being done in RPM format, pretty easy to keep
track.  In the case of the OEM I used to work for, all these packages
were applied in a %post during kickstarts.  Updates to the post script
were regulated and any changes would cause the need for updating various
materials, such as a website that listed the changes.

It gets _really_ hard to draw the line on when Fedora is changed
"enough" to not be Fedora anymore.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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