Mahesh T. Pai said on Thu, Dec 25, 2003 at 10:18:07PM +0530,:
But more than the Courts, we need to look into the ethical issues involved. RH does not like their logos to be used; the logos are not under a free license. Do not distribute them. Period. End of distribution.
The costs to be paid to the free software developer community by going ahead with such distribution will be high. The entire geographical region will have to bear that. Can we afford it??
I am afraid I am not clear enough on this and open to be under-understood.
Software distribution involves law of Copyright. When people use a special symbol to refer to a product from a special origin, the law of Trademarks applies. And then, some people claim patents too apply.
The free software movement uses the law of copyright to keep programs unrestricted. When people claim patents to apply, we insist that the patents too should be licensed free of restrictions. As a community, we do not concern ourselves with trademarks *for keeping software free*.
The individual members / corporates consisting the community can, and do apply trademarks to programs / collections distributed by them. We have an obligation to respect the terms under which use of these tradekmarks are permitted.
I invite your attention to the case of a once popular mail client. It was under an apparently free license. But creator of the ptogram choose to interpret the license in a manner which restricts users' freedoms; with the result that major distros ceased to distribute binaries of the mail client. We did not insist that 'but every one else interprets those words differently'.
I suggest that we adopt the same approach here. RH's and our perceptions of what constitutes `commercial use' may differ; but if RH insists that a particular activity is commercial, we can and should respect that view in so far as use of anything under a non-free license is concerned. We should not speculate on what the courts *may* hold. This approach will earn us better standing in the community.