As said above, for Fedora and CentOS, it's pretty straightforward and unambiguous. Copyright is only involved in giving rights under license, the question here is one of trademark. If there is any apparent gray area, it would be good to go with a report to one of the appropriate email addresses -- legal@lists.fedoraproject.org or centos-tm@centos.org. There is an explicit goal in both projects to be as reusable as possible.
In both distros, there are two packages that need to be changed - *-release and *-logos. That is, fedora-release and fedora-logos, or centos-release and centos-logos. This is a very long established practice with a history of public support from Red Hat's legal team that you can do-what-you-like as long as you change those two packages and have a different name for your release.
In fact, the Fedora Project has the 'Fedora Remix' logo process that allows you to do what you like with the code, and you have the option of calling it a 'Fedora Remix' - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix)
You do not need to rebuild the rest of the distro. You just need to replace the logos in the above two packages, rebuild them, and you are good to go. In fact, as mentioned above, Fedora has a generic-logos package -- you don't have to bother with artwork (as long as you don't mind dancing hot dogs of unknown meat-like origin https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=495561 (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=495561) .)
It is true that both projects ask that you do not call your release 'Fedora' or 'CentOS' if you change any packages, and the reasoning is pretty clear -- when you rebuild, you could introduce changes (including malicious code on purpose or by accident), and both communities have enormous reputations to protect. What they release is built, tested, and signed on a protected build system. That's part of what the brand (trademark) promise provides.
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Re: Ubuntu and copyright violations for containers ...
Date: 2015-08-06 09:50 pm (UTC)In both distros, there are two packages that need to be changed - *-release and *-logos. That is, fedora-release and fedora-logos, or centos-release and centos-logos. This is a very long established practice with a history of public support from Red Hat's legal team that you can do-what-you-like as long as you change those two packages and have a different name for your release.
In fact, the Fedora Project has the 'Fedora Remix' logo process that allows you to do what you like with the code, and you have the option of calling it a 'Fedora Remix' - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix)
You do not need to rebuild the rest of the distro. You just need to replace the logos in the above two packages, rebuild them, and you are good to go. In fact, as mentioned above, Fedora has a generic-logos package -- you don't have to bother with artwork (as long as you don't mind dancing hot dogs of unknown meat-like origin https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=495561 (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=495561) .)
It is true that both projects ask that you do not call your release 'Fedora' or 'CentOS' if you change any packages, and the reasoning is pretty clear -- when you rebuild, you could introduce changes (including malicious code on purpose or by accident), and both communities have enormous reputations to protect. What they release is built, tested, and signed on a protected build system. That's part of what the brand (trademark) promise provides.