Free vs. pay versions

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

On 8/22/2010 5:10 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On Aug 22, 2010, at 4:44 PM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>>
>> Um. What exactly was incorrect there?
> 
> Trademarks and ISV certification are not "released to the public".  At all.  Without those you don't have a genuine RHEL.  You may have something close but you don't have the certification and you don't have the right to use the Red Hat trademarks.

That's not software, which was what the whole conversation leading up to
that was about (i.e. whether there was some special blob of functional
software, not branding, that RHEL had that CentOS didn't).  Of course
they don't let just anyone use their trademarks.  The Apache Foundation
won't either.  Nor will Mozilla, or Canonical, or Debian, or Slackware,
etc.  Redhat is a little more restrictive than some; for example you can
redistribute Mozilla-branded products (and still call them by their
Mozilla-trademarked names) as long as you don't alter them.  But if you
modify Firefox and try to distribute it, you'd better change the name to
something that doesn't include 'firefox' in it (IIRC debian came close
to doing this a few years ago, because they wanted to make some changes
to firefox and not wait for Mozilla's approval).

How exactly would you even release an ISV certification to the public?
The whole point of certification is that someone did enough testing to
convince themselves that "this thing works on that thing", and they are
so sure that it works that they'll even let you call and talk to support
people and engineers if it isn't working for you.  Redhat does not
control CentOS, and therefore cannot (even it wanted to) vouch for it
being a faithful replication.  Many people (myself included) assume that
CentOS is a faithful replication and binary-compatible, but if it isn't
for whatever reason, you can't blame RedHat.

Matt