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Comment by McGlockenshire | Hacker News Reader

Additional useful highlights:

> - Some of us now work for Red Hat, but not RHEL.

> - Red Hat is offering to sponsor some of the buildsystem and initial content delivery resources

> - Because we are now able to work with the Red Hat legal teams, some of the contraints that resulted in efforts like CentOS-QA being behind closed doors, now go away and we hope to have the entire build, test, and delivery chain open to anyone who wishes to come and join the effort.

> - The Red Hat Enterprise Linux to CentOS firewall will also remain. Members and contributors to the CentOS efforts are still isolated from the RHEL Groups inside Red Hat, with the only interface being srpm / source path tracking, no sooner than is considered released. In summary: we retain an upstream.

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Why would the build, test, and delivery chain be subject to Red Hat's legal team? Did the process to remove Red Hat's marks from their GPL'd source trigger trademark issues?

I think the problem is that if they missed a trademark then CentOS was distributing Redhat's Trademarks putting them in a sticky legal position.

This is one of the reasons for being a fully independent distro with no ties to a "corporation". Debian comes to mind, as does Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, a couple of others. Being able to go about your business as a distro without corporate oversight is desirable these days.

CentOS now has a "master" where before, the GPL allowed them to simply take the source, remove trademarks, and re-compile as CentOS, getting the benefits of a corporately-funded distro without the legal constraints of evil IP and what not.

RH also may choose to play ball with certain organizations that I don't agree with. This may affect CentOS in some way. An indy distro can give them the finger and tell them to get bent. My goal is not money, it's freedom from oversight, freedom to do as I please, freedom to have an unencumbered distro not tainted by the likes of the false notion of IP, legal nonsense, you name it. Debian is growing for a reason. One of those reasons is because it's an indy distro.

I understand what you mean by independence from corporation, but from CentOS it's the other way round.

CentOS has always been a "slave" of Red Hat by design and, before this move, the master could even sue it for misappropriating trademarks. Now, QA of packages can be done in the open, because it would no longer be as problematic to ship test-quality packages that still happen to include a Red Hat trademark.

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