Is linux free 5031

Correct but irrelevant to the question of whether the result is RH or not.

Correct, and relevant, in that if you keep RHs modifications, then you are definitely looking at-keeping RHs work.

Correct, but irrelevant to the question ...

That does not affect the question of WHAT you have - indeed, I believe that you are tacitly agreeing that you have hold of a modified RH distro, which itself consists (largely) of modified original works placed under GPL by their authors.

Yes - you have the right to copy and modify those original sources AND the modified work as produced by RH. However this is a different argument to the one advanced by Michael, which I believe to be false and which I was arguing against.

I agree (for certain values of "do what you will" defined in the GPL).

But you-he-they modified parts of the distro which are NOT under GPL, so I don't think that was necessarily an allowed act. Nor do I know for a fact that the compilation itself is under GPL (nor am I sure what it would mean for a compilation to be under GPL - presumably the "source" is the spec files in the srpms, or some such) and thus I do not know to what extent you are allowed to make a derivative compilation, or what you may do with that derivative once you have made it.

So I agree with "No, it is the GPL that gives you that permission" as far as modifying and redistributing certain individual programs in the distribution is concerned. And I agree with "And without the GPL they are not allowed to distribute their own distribution" insofar as it relates to the GPL portions of their distribution. But I believe that those "insofar as"s make it plain that the totality is not covered, unless you advance your doctrine of contagion by "more than mere aggregation" to the whole distribution, in one sense or other. And I do not regard that doctrine as proved, though I do not feel it is impossible (I would give it about a 5% truth value evaluation).

And I also do not agree that even if you are allowed to redistribute the individual programs (by GPL or otherwise), that you are free of copyright restrictions with respect to the collection as a whole. I mean presumably RH made specific choices about what to put in their distro, what versions, what alterations, what configurations, and so on, and the sum of those choices is under their authorship, hence under copyright.

So I would suggest that one could certainly take RH individual GPLed programs and buttemble them into a new distro of ones own, but I am not sure that one can just take the WHOLE RH distro, wipe over their two logo files with blanks, and redistribute that.

Well, nobody seems to disagree with that, but life goes on as normal!

Peter