OT: Media format patents and commercial installations

[Tom Diehl]

Jesse Keating Wrote:
>
> 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.

I suspect that it is harder than you suggest. I bought hardware from $OEM
you used to work for just before you left. When I realized that I did not
have the same versions of the $OEM RPMS/SRPMS that came installed on the
machines I requested them from $OEM. It took them 2 weeks to get the
$OEM RPMS/SRPMS that came installed on the machine. The hardest part for
me was convincing $OEM that $OEM RPMS/SRPMS were not on the FC3 cd's they
sent with the machines. They did finally get them to me but I was told they
needed to contact you after you were gone, to get the SRPMS.

This is not a complaint, $OEM did the right thing and a year later I am very
happy with said hardware. It is just an example of things that are not always
as easy as they seem.

Regards,

Tom Diehl		tdiehl at rogueind.com		Spamtrap address mtd123 at rogueind.com