"Use of the CentOS MARKS to identify software that combines any portion of the CentOS software with any other software , unless the combined distribution is an official CentOS distribution. FOR EXAMPLE, you MAY NOT distribute a combination of the CentOS software with software released by the FooStack project under the name ‘CentOS FooStack Distro’." [emphasis added]

Additionally, I would like to point out items #2 and #4 from the same URL, their "Acceptable Uses" section, and a portion of the opening paragraph:

"2. You MAY USE the Word Mark, but NOT the Logos, to truthfully describe the origin of the software that you are providing but not the software itself, WHERE WHAT YOU ARE DISTRIBUTING IS MODIFIED OFFICIAL CENTOS SOURCE CODE OR is a build COMPILED FROM MODIFIED OFFICIAL CENTOS SOURCE CODE. You MAY SAY, for example: ‘This software is derived from the source code for the CentOS distribution.’ However, you MAY NOT SAY that the software is CentOS." [emphasis added]

"4. You may use the ‘Powered by CentOS’ logo to truthfully state that your application runs on or uses an official CentOS release."

"The CentOS Project is by its nature a noncommercial community project that provides software free of charge…"

To my layman eyes, this would seem to explicitly contradict the claims of this article, in that:

1. You cannot use the word mark "CentOS" as part of your project name.

2. You cannot use the CentOS logo in your project description IF you have altered the CentOS source code. You can however say that it is derived from CentOS if you did alter source code.

3. You CAN use the "powered by CentOS" logo if your project sits on top of CentOS in its unaltered (as in source code) form — it is my understanding that PIAF and Incredible PBX are the exact type of projects to which this is referring. Perform a base install of CentOS, and then stick your custom project on top of CentOS, just like PIAF/Incredible PBX does.

4. The software is still as free (as in beer) as CentOS has always been, and as RHEL has been (sans pre-compilation for RHEL of course).

No where do I see any mention whatsoever about the preclusion of the use of CentOS _software/code_ as the base of any other Open Source project. Furthermore, the entire page is only referring to the "Word Mark" and "logos" of CentOS, as explained in the opening sentence of the page. No where do I see a single item listing reference use of the software itself.

Red Hat and CentOS have made it clear that, "the CentOS Linux platform isn’t changing" , and that this change will actually increase the community involvement for the distro because they no longer have to worry about the Red Hat [intellectual property] "firewall" as they refered to it. ( http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-January/020100.html )

Protection of the CentOS work mark and logo are, in my opinion, an asset to the community of users under the provisions laid out in this document. It means we can trust the logo when we see it.

Off the top of my head, thinking of restrictions within other Open Source projects, I see no difference between these conditions and any other major Open Source project work mark or logo restrictions. I think it allows for reasonable and fair use in the description of projects that utilize CentOS, while preventing its deceptive or confusing use in a negative way.

If your argument is not in fact about use of the software/code, but rather the use of the CentOS logo or word mark as part of a project name (as opposed to "powered by CentOS"), then I don’t see how this goal would be of benefit to the community or its users.

Lastly, I’m glad that most of the CentOS team is now getting paid for what they’ve been doing in their spare time for several years now (on top of their $dayjob).

[WM: You raise some good points. Let me clarify some of the can’ts and musts in the article and my previous comment. Statutory construction is often a slippery slope. The GPL license walks a fine line between patent, trademark, and copyright law. Think of it as a "live and let live" license. The example given in the license itself has to do with patent enforcement, but the same applies to trademarks and copyrights by the express language of the license.

Hope that clarifies the interplay of the GPL with the consequences of patent, trademark, and copyright enforcement.]

Given Red Hat’s track record with buying open source projects and keeping them open and available, and rapidly and drastically improving them, I think the chances are strong that this will actually happen.

For example, how has Red Hat’s acquisition of Qumranet worked out for you? I’ve seen some good articles regarding KVM virtual machines, and I know I can do a lot more with my KVM VMs today than I could in 2008.

Another example — look at GlusterFS. There are more examples, but those 2 are off the top of my head.

If for some reason, if Red Hat suddenly decides to change its track record and doesn’t hold true to its word, anyone is free to grab the Open Source source RPMs from Red Hat’s FTP server, just like CentOS did, and just like Oracle does, just like Scientific Linux does, recompile them, and make a new distro. That’s the beauty of Open Source, or in the case of Oracle, the way to re-brand someone else’s product and try to steal their customers.

Thus far, as far as Red Hat is concerned I know that I personally have gotten a heck of a lot more than I have paid for, being a Red Hat user since Red Hat 5.2, Fedora since Fedora Core 3, and CentOS since CentOS 4. How much has that cost me? I spent $30 back in 1998 to buy a commercial version of Red Hat 5.2 in CompUSA. (This excludes what my daytime job provider pays to RH for RHEL licenses, and what they paid RH for a training class and certification exams.)

As far as the trademark is concerned, it seems silly that the CentOS name hasn’t already been registered.

I read through the legal terms on the new CentOS site, and with my layman eyes, didn’t see anything that looked overtly inappropriate or different from just about every other Open Source project name.

With as many people using it, preventing people from naming their projects and products in such a way as to imply association with CentOS is a good thing — no matter who owns the name.

Case in point, if NV decided to rename PIAF to RedHatAsteriskInaBox, or CentOSAsterisk, I think that would confuse a number of people into thinking there was an official association with the OS distributions.

As a long-time RH software user with no association with the company, I am going to adopt a wait-and-see attitude, with hopeful expectations based upon their long-standing track record. I think this change is actually a very good thing.

[WM: I hope you’re right. Brand confusion with a trade name is very different than the concerns that have been raised in this article. Once you release a product with a GPL license, the public has a right to copy the code and add to it so long as the original GPL license including the licensor’s copyright is preserved together with your copyright if you choose to add one. The original licensor cannot restrict the pieces of the product that can be used unless some of the components can stand on their own and have been specifically excluded from the grant of the GPL license to use "the product." In other words, you can’t sprinkle trademarks and copyrighted works throughout the GPL code and then claim that nobody can use them. You licensed that use when you released the code under the GPL unless you specifically excluded independent "works." In the case of Red Hat, they really had no choice but to release the entire work as GPL because you can’t add more restrictive items to a GPL work in order to restrict future copying of the original GPL creations. And most of the code under the Red Hat umbrella was GPL creations of others!]