OT: Media format patents and commercial installations

[Matt Domsch]

On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 10:04:44AM -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> This clarifies my interpretation of a). Pre-install OEM services are
> "okay" as long as the OEM makes it clear, before purchase, with
> specificity, as to what is being installed that either replaces Fedora
> components or adds new components.

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.

-Matt

-- 
Matt Domsch
Software Architect
Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux
Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com