2009/7/9 Rony gnulinuxist@gmail.com:
No. RHEL is FOSS + Trade Marked = Paid and not re-distributable.
Trademark in itself does not make it non-FOSS. Paid or free of cost is not at all a criteria to decide if it is Free Software or Open Source. Last point is what we are debating.
GNU's guidelines for a Free distrution says
"Similarly, the distribution itself may hold particular trademarks. It is not a problem if modification requires removal of these trademarks, as long as they can readily be removed without losing functionality.
However, it is unacceptable to use trademarks to restrict verbatim copying and redistribution of the whole distribution, or any part."
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
These guidelines disqualifies RHEL on other counts already. But as the entire distrution is under GPL, it would invalidate the trademark requirement.
Now I would like to hear from Redhat what do they say about section 7 of GPL
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
It is indeed a very close call.
- Praveen