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If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

lwn.net

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Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#11

Post by rincebrain »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #6
raverbashing wrote: post #3

Ok the real question is, how does this compares to CentOS/"Prominent Linux Vendor" relationship And Linux Mint also recompiles and replaces the trademarks no?

> And Linux Mint also recompiles and replaces the trademarks no? Sure, but presumably that took a lot of effort.

Actually, the claim made by someone[1] in one of the replies on LWN was that Mint ended up getting a license from Canonical, so if you wanted to spin off from Linux Mint, you too would require a license from Canonical or having to dive in and rip out any Ubuntu trademarks.

[1] - https://lwn.net/Articles/665350/

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#12

Post by raverbashing »

lmm wrote: post #7
raverbashing wrote: post #3

Ok the real question is, how does this compares to CentOS/"Prominent Linux Vendor" relationship And Linux Mint also recompiles and replaces the trademarks no?

Did you read Garrett's post? Prominent Linux Vendor segregates its trademarks into three packages and documents that you need to replace those specific packages (and only those) with versions that don't infringe their trademarks if you wish to redistribute.

I had read it yes (and missed that part), but curiously that part refers to Fedora (which was traditionally more liberal), not RHEL

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#13

Post by thiagoharry »

netheril96 wrote: post #4
pnt12 wrote: post #2

I agree: Canonical should make it easier for developers to strip the company's trademarks when forking their applications. Canonical's relationship with the rest of the FOSS community always seemed a bit screwed up to me. They try to make Ubuntu the best Linux distro while ignoring what all the other ones are doing. All other distros seem much more friendly towards integration between projects, to benefit from the sh…

Correct me if I am wrong, but to my understanding, both Unity and Mir are open source, and nothing stops other distros from adopting it.

Unity for example, needs a forked glib to be compiled and work. And only Ubuntu uses this forked glib. I don't know about Mir.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#15

Post by reddotX »

rmc wrote: post #9
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are open-source, but they only really work on Ubuntu. Upstart is another example, and it's part of why other Ubuntu-specific things won't work on other distros. Other distros could try to port Ubuntu projects, but why would Canonical accept their patches upstream?

I believe ubuntu is going to change from upstart to systemd soon?

ubuntu is using systemd since 15.04

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#16

Post by spaceSub »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #5
netheril96 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I am wrong, but to my understanding, both Unity and Mir are open source, and nothing stops other distros from adopting it.

They are open-source, but they only really work on Ubuntu. Upstart is another example, and it's part of why other Ubuntu-specific things won't work on other distros. Other distros could try to port Ubuntu projects, but why would Canonical accept their patches upstream?

Actually the systemd guys looked at upstart for redhat in the beginning, but choose to rewrite it anyway. That had nothing to do with the Canonical entanglement though.

Though I dislike Unity and Mir, I think RedHats understanding of "Open" Source is a lot more disturbing.. https://lwn.net/Articles/432012

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#17

Post by paulajohnson »

I think that you could make a good-faith effort to get rid of as many as possible, for instance by grepping the code tree for the word "Canonical" (with a capital C) and manually scanning all images. Then if Canonical find something you missed you can promptly remove it. At that point any infringement is de minimis and not something they can build a case on.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#18

Post by Already__Taken »

raverbashing wrote: post #12
lmm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read Garrett's post? Prominent Linux Vendor segregates its trademarks into three packages and documents that you need to replace those specific packages (and only those) with versions that don't infringe their trademarks if you wish to redistribute.

I had read it yes (and missed that part), but curiously that part refers to Fedora (which was traditionally more liberal), not RHEL

As I understand it Fedora is where RHEL comes from is it not? So Redhat replace in their own branding just like everyone else.

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#19

Post by makomk »

raverbashing wrote: post #3

Ok the real question is, how does this compares to CentOS/"Prominent Linux Vendor" relationship And Linux Mint also recompiles and replaces the trademarks no?

According to the comments on Matthew Garrett's blog, RHEL has an almost identical clause in its EULA: in order to redistribute open source code in RHEL, you must "remove and replace all occurrences of Red Hat trademarks". (Unless they've changed it, Red Hat also has a policy that redistributing their Linux kernel patchset they supply is a breach of contract and they will terminate support and updates for anyone caught doing this. Yes, they're working around the GPL to stop people redistributing GPL code.)

This is apparently why CentOS takes so long to track new RHEL releases: https://lwn.net/Articles/417849/

Re: If it's not practical to redistribute, it's not free software in practice

#20

Post by creshal »

netheril96 wrote: post #4
pnt12 wrote: post #2

I agree: Canonical should make it easier for developers to strip the company's trademarks when forking their applications. Canonical's relationship with the rest of the FOSS community always seemed a bit screwed up to me. They try to make Ubuntu the best Linux distro while ignoring what all the other ones are doing. All other distros seem much more friendly towards integration between projects, to benefit from the sh…

Correct me if I am wrong, but to my understanding, both Unity and Mir are open source, and nothing stops other distros from adopting it.

They're open source, but they rely on so much ubuntu-specific infrastructure and patches that it's infeasible to get them running anywhere else.

Cf. the effort necessary to get Unity running on Arch: https://github.com/chenxiaolong/Unity-for-Arch

You have to rip out and replace a lot of software, all the way down to GTK itself, just to make it work.

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