Re: Juridical problems

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <19980913102909.4339.qmail@sidney.remcomp.fr>, jfm2@club-internet.fr writes:
>
>When hacking the install I stumbled upon the string
>"Copyright by Red Hat Software".
>
>I am not sure we can replace it simply by "Project Independence"
>because 
>
>a) the name Project Independence is already taken.  Of course

Exactly which 'Project Independence' variants are taken, and in
which countries? I see 'Project Independence, Ltd' in infoseek.
Perhaps somebody with more legal experience can say if you can
simply make a different variant on it and call it your own.

>we could call it "Independence Linux" or (for keeping RMS happy)

or yes, you could simply rename the project so you have a unique
name for copyrights. I like the idea that "Independence is a project
to make Redhat more user-friendly", and by implying you have your
own separate distribution, that becomes less clear. 

>"Independence Gnu/Linux"

That will make rms very unhappy indeed: the goal of gnu/linux is to
create a complete operating environment based entirely on free software.
Redhat (and thus Independence) is very far from that, and not
working very hard in that direction. Which is ok -- it's not your
primary goal.

>b) We have no juridical entity.  A solution would be to copyright
>using the names of the participants but putting my name in front of
>the first thing the user will see -the installation panel- seems a bit

agreed, that doesn't sound like a very community-friendly approach.

>violent.  Perhaps better would be to have a "Contributors" and put
>Copyrights only in the sources like it is done in Linux kernel.
>
>Any ideas?

On another note, are you allowed to simply replace somebody else's
copyright with your own when you start distributing their material
(even modified)? That seems fishy. :)

--Roger