Unofficial Fedora Spins

Unofficial Fedora Spins

I think this article missed an important point that I brought up in the fedora-devel thread. Namely, that it is possible to strictly adhere to the current fedora trademark and artwork guidelines, *AND* produce a custom spin with any arbitrary modifications.

The 'trick' is to follow the trademark guidelines which lay out a legal definition for how anyone and everyone is permitted to redistribute "non-modified fedora".

Specifically, you need to maintain the integrity of the original fedora software. I.e. provide the livecd (or other) .iso embedded in a new .iso completely unmodified. Then you need to merely bundle your own arbitrary patches in that iso, along with a custom bootloader configuration and initrd which make it as easy as selecting a LiveCD bootloader choice, for the end-user to cause the patches to be transparently applied early during the initrd boot sequence.

I think this idea scared Rahul a bit, and the trademark guidelines may be modified to prevent this in the future. But for now, my reading of those guidelines suggests that it is even acceptable to use the fedora name and logo in the custom bootloader splash/choice screen, of such a LiveCD. The guidelines were I believe put in place to specifically allow someone like Dell, to include arbitrary extra drivers and/or software. But really, any arbitrary 'patch' may be added. The trick is to just write software that is clever enough so that all the end-user has to do to apply the patch is select an alternate bootloader choice. And it really isn't that hard to do this.