What are consequences of "merger necessitates removal of ... packages due to licensing issues"

[Sean Estabrooks]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 13:39:11 -0400
"Bill Rugolsky Jr." <brugolsky at telemetry-investments.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 09:31:15AM -0700, Randall J. Parr wrote:
> > I am also concerned that this "open" project has made only these
> > vague statements. This seems like a pretty major point and one which
> > you'all should be up front about.
>  
> IANAL, but ...
> 
> I think that one should grant that any policy in this area is largely
> the domain of lawyers, not engineers, and that it touches on areas
> that are far from settled law.  There will certainly have to be "3rd
> Party"
> repositories, hosted in the (rapidly shrinking) free world.
> 
> Some mechanism will need to be used to find these repositories.
> I imagine that it will have to be some sort of search facility, not a
> static collection of links, or a hierarchical naming scheme like DNS,
> in order to maintain an arms-length relationship.  Otherwise, Red Hat
> expose itself to charges of contributory infringement.
> 
> As a first step, I would suggest defining a repository link filetype,
> akin to a torrent file, so that searches in Google or other engines
> for (mp3 filetype:fedora) or similar return a useful link.  (Use of
> a filetype that can be verified by the search engine helps to avoid it
> being hijacked for other purposes).  Such a mechanism will also likely
> require a GPG web-of-trust model for the repository keys, again, to
> maintain an arms-length relationship while protecting package
> integrity.
> 

Bill,

IANAL either and maybe that's why i didn't understand much of what you
said.   The Fedora Project and RedHat _merged_, what is it exactly that
RedHat must keep an arms length relationship to?   Itself?

Sean.