Less than a month after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 4, the number one Linux distributor finds itself walking a fine line in protecting its trademark from clones of its latest product.
One of the fundamental tenets of open source, and in particular the General Public License
That means there’s not much Red Hat
Finnish group Lineox released a RHEL 4 clone on Feb. 25. Pie Box Linux followed with its iteration on Feb. 28, and CentOS released its clone on March 2. Whitebox Linux is expected to release a RHEL 4 clone sometime soon. However, the clones are not supported.
A Red Hat spokesperson was unavailable for comment about the clones. But recent legal correspondence from the company to some of the clones signals how Red Hat is balancing the interests of open source software with the need to protect its own interests, including its own intellectual property such as trademarks.
In letters from legal counsel, the company advises the clones against using potentially infringing marks on their sites.
One of the clones, CentOS, published the letter, which it received a few weeks before it released version 4.
“We understand that you are distributing, on your Web site located at http://www.centos.org, CentOS Enterprise class Linux software that was
developed using Red Hat’s open source software,” the letter states. “While
Red Hat permits others to redistribute the software that constitutes Red Hat
Linux, Red Hat does not authorize any person to use the RED HAT marks in
association with such redistribution in any fashion, except by express
agreement,” it continued.
“In this regard, [the company] is concerned that your use of the RED HAT marks on your Web site in this manner is likely to create confusion, mistake and/or deception among consumers with respect to the source, origin, sponsorship or approval of the products sold under your company name.”
The CentOS Web site has removed all Red Hat references and now refers to
the company as “a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor.”
Red Hat also contacted Pie Box Linux about potential consumer confusion.
“Red
Hat [is] required to protect its trademarks. But they were quite friendly
and polite and they went as far as to confirm that they had no objection to
our product. We were more than happy to reword our advert,” Setchell said. “We
have the utmost respect for Red Hat and everything they have done for the
community over the years,” he added. “We have absolutely no desire to upset
them.”
None of the clones claim any direct relationship with Red Hat, nor can the cloned enterprise distros benefit from Red Hat’s customer and technical support or vendor certification, which is included in a Red Hat subscription. The cloned products are built from essentially the same open source code as RHEL and are derived from the same Red Hat sources.
In the case of RHEL, specific branding, trademarks and other such
intellectual property are removed by the clones from the Red Hat sources in order to comply with the terms of Red Hat’s End-User License Agreement
(EULA) and to not infringe on its intellectual property rights, such as trademark symbols.
“We describe our product as being built from the source RPMs [Package Manager] released by Red Hat,” Chris Setchell, spokesman for U.K.-based Pie Box, told
internetnews.com. “People are smart enough to realize this means they
are getting a product that is essentially the same as Red Hat’s but without
the support.”
The clone vendors said they do not consider themselves to be in
competition with Red Hat’s flagship product, because they’re not selling the same thing that Red Hat is selling.
“Red Hat are essentially selling support; we do not offer support,” Setchell explained. “This means that our targeted clients are different to those of Red Hat.” He didn’t say who those clients might be.
Though the clones are not necessarily in the same support business as Red Hat, that doesn’t mean they ignore users’ security.
“We get the freely available updates to source RPMs from Red Hat servers and rebuild them,” Donavon Nelson, CentOS developer, told
internetnews.com. “There is a bit of a lag between Red Hat-announced errata and it being available for CentOS.”
Total download numbers for all of the RHEL clones are unknown. Lineox co-founder Raimo Koski told internetnews.com that it was very hard to estimate download numbers due to the different mirrors available.
“There were maybe several hundreds of bit torrent downloads, but I
haven’t tried yet to analyze the log,” Koski said. “Outbound referrals from our site would suggest something like around 2,000 downloads from mirrors, so my guesstimate is from several thousand up to around 10,000.”
The RHEL clone development communities also note they contribute
to open source development in some way. CentOS’ Nelson said that most
CentOS developers and many users submit bug reports to the Red Hat bugzilla system. And Lineox’s developers aren’t strangers to Red Hat’s development ecosystem, having made some Finnish language contributions.
“Most FC [Fedora Core] and RHEL system utilities (redhat/system-config-*) have mine or Tomi Kajala’s Finnish translations, but now they are mostly maintained by Fedora volunteers,” Koski said.
Pie Box developers also contribute by filing bug reports and helping out on various mailing lists. From Pie Box’s point of view they don’t want to be considered leeches.
“We realize that there are a few who view ‘Enterprise Linux cloners as some form of parasite making money out of the hard work of others. In fact, we are just providing a service,” Setchell said. “Anyone can download the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, compile it and use it. That is the whole point of open source,” he said.
“However, not everybody has the time, expertise or willingness to do this, and so we provide that service to those people.”
Updates prior version to correct spelling of Pie Box
