[ILUG] The old CD thread again {RHEL this time}

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Conor Daly (conor.daly_ilug at cod.homelinux.org):

> So, loaning CDs to somebody to do an install appears to be OK but making
> copies of the ISOs to give to somebody is not.

The latter's OK, too, as far as I can tell.

> OTOH, Rick's http://linuxmafia.com/faq/RedHat/rhel-isos.html#summary says:
> 
> 	"Non-commercial redistribution appears not to violate copyright,
> 	trademark, or contract law."
> 
> I'm not sure how he squares that with the "License:" entry in the
> redhat-logos and anaconda-images rpms.  Rick?? 

That entry conditions one's copyright licence to those two sets of
images upon observance of Red Hat's corporate trademark policy.  The 
latter concerns commercial usage only -- because (other than the tort of
trademark disparagement), trademark law itself is limited to commercial use.

But, as it says at the top of my page, the page _does_ need to be
rewritten, as soon as I've had time to resolve these questions:

1.  Do the RHEL _binary_ CDs include any software under non-restributable
proprietary terms?  I'm honestly not sure:  I suspect they might.  My
initial pass through licences involved going through the _downloadable SRPMS_,
and there's no guarantee that the binary CDs don't add some further
packages.

2.  Does the RPM build process mix trademark-encumbered contents from
redhat-logos and anaconda-images into various other packages'
installations, during compilation?  The answer to this is almost
certainly "Yes".  If so, then many more of RHEL's _binary_ RPMs are
trademark-encumbered (and thus proprietary) than just redhat-logos and
anaconda-images.

Getting the answer to question #1 is likely to be time-consuming:  Going
through _every_ licence of _every_ package attentively is a real chore.