On Friday 15 June 2007 21:29:22 Linus Torvalds wrote:
They do have copyrights. They license them under the GPL, and afterwards they
still have them.
I agree that they have this right, but that wasn't the rationale they gave in
the cease and desist letters they sent out in 2001. Those said it was ok to
redistribute, but you can't use their trademarks to promote it when you did
so:
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/12/10/2014239&mode=thread
[Rummages around for their current policy statement...]
The restriction is embodied in their "trademark guidelines and policies":
http://www.redhat.com/about/companyprofile/trademark/
If you open the PDF:
http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/corp/RH-3573_284204_TM_Gd.pdf
Page one, the right hand side talks about copyright, second paragraph:
That seems to say that their compilation copyright is also licensed under the
GPL, and what they're not giving permission to use is the trademark.
I agree they claim compilation copyrights. But they seem to have licensed
their compilation copyrights under GPLv2.
If they're including GPLed works in the compilation, this may actually be a
requirement. (Lawyers would happily fight over this issue for months:
asserting a copyright over the aggregation takes the "mere" out of it, don't
you think? Is a compilation a derived work of the components that were
compiled, at least for the purposes of GPLv2? Can it be "mere aggregation"
if you're enforcing a copyright on that aggregation? Does it not then become
a larger work with GPL components? I dunno.)
You'll notice that back under Bob Young, Red Hat carefully didn't go there, by
licensing the compilation GPLv2 and segregating incompatibly licensed content
to a separate CD. After the IPO, he retired and different management took
over, and introduced Red Hat Enterprise to eat Sun's market[1], and who knows
what they're thinking now? I suspect their lawyers still want the
GPL-incompatible stuff on a separate CD so they can sleep at night.
(Either that, or they just don't assert a compilation copyright, but why give
that up if they don't have to?)
The existence of CentOS seems to argue against this. They say:
I haven't noticed any specific non-GPL packages removed from Centos. Buried
down in their FAQ they say they're building the same set of packages as are
in Red Hat Enterprise AS.
I suspect the reason for a lack of obvious proprietary stuff in the RHEL base
distro is that Red Hat's lawyers don't want to give up the option to enforce
the compilation copyright on said base distro, but also don't want to raise
the spectre of enforcing a copyright on a derived work of GPL code (the
compilation, which includes GPL code and if copyrighted probably isn't "mere
aggregation") that contains code which can't be licensed under the GPL.
I don't know the answer to this one. This is the sort of thing that gives
lawyers ulcers. (And yachts.) But I can believe their lawyers want to keep
their options open if they're sufficiently unsure how the hypothetical would
play out in court...
Red Hat created the "Fedora" trademark to have a separate and more liberally
licensed trademark that people like cheapbytes.com could use without
reflecting on Red Hat Enterprise. Unfortunately, trying to find reference
for this is non-obvious, because, the Fedora Trademarks page is:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/TrademarkGuidelines
Which contains no actual content, but instead links to a fedora.redhat.com
page which is 404. :P
But again, it's trademark not copyright they're restricting.
Sure, it's spelled out in some detail by the copyright office right here:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.html#compilations
And in less penetrable legalese here [2]:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#103
However, mostly I just deal with straightforward derivative works when
worrying about GPL enforcement. (When I brought up compilation copyright to
the SFLC guys last year in relation to enforcing the busybox copyrights, they
didn't think they needed to go there since between Erik and myself they
represent copyrights to a significant portion of the entire codebase,
including the central plumbing you can't run the thing without).
Intellectual property law has been a hobby of mine ever since I visited the
Patent and Trademark office in washington DC with my grandfather back in the
90's, and picked up the big green brochures explaining this stuff. I think I
still have the badge in a box somewhere. There's all SORTS of weird corner
cases to this stuff. (Did you know the federal government can't create a
copyright? Everything created by federal employees is automatically in the
public domain. So the way they get around that is they hire contractors,
have them create copyrighted materials, and transfer the copyrights to the
government...)
Rob
[1] Large purchasing contracts, especially for government projects, often cap
a supplier's profits at a percentage of costs. This means the way for a
supplier to get a larger profit off the contract is to user more expensive
components. So they'd rather grab $5000/seat OS than a $20/seat OS because
the same 10% profit is $500 vs $2. This is a big reason you saw lots of
Solaris and AIX and such in Navy bids 10 years ago: it was popular _because_
it was expensive. Then Red Hat figured out "wait, you mean if I can come up
with an excuse to charge a couple orders of magnitude more per seat, MORE
people will buy it?" And they invented "Red Hat Enterprise" to soak that
kind of purchaser for all they were worth, and it was so lucrative they
retreated up into that space to attack the soft underbelly of Sun...
[2] The section relating specifically to computer programs is interesting
reading too: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117
The stuff about "archival copies" is explicitly statutory. When I first heard
about it I thought it was just case law...
--
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
- Ken Thompson.
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