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David Brown
When I wrote it, I thought there was a distinction. BTHOOM what
I was thinking about.
So the attributes are not changed. That is what I was ranting
about. It's a sore point in my little neck of the woods.
I gathered as much from your other posts later on.
Isn't branding equivalent to attributes, as in the copyright?
In our biz, the copyright didn't have the author of the code
because DEC owned it. Is it the custom now to place the
author's attributes in the copyright statement?
Normally code written while employed is "owned" by the company, so the
company name is in the copyrights. The actual author's name may or may
not be included.
Branding is a very separate concept to copyright attribution. Branding
is about what the user sees - on a Red Hat system, the user is left in
no doubt that they are using Red Hat Linux, because the name, logo,
colour scheme, etc., are all over the desktop and documentation. From
the user's viewpoint, they bought the distribution from Red Hat, because
they trust Red Hat to have put together a working package. But
underneath, the copyrights say who owns the code (and normally who wrote
it, modified it, and/or is responsible for maintaining it). Red Hat can
take code written by others (under open source licenses) and put their
own branding on it, but they can't change the copyrights. Similarly,
Cent OS can take Red Hat authored open source code and put their own
branding on it. It would be illegal for them to misuse Red Hat's names
or logos, and risky to come close (they could be in trouble if they
called their distro "Red Cap"), but as long as users are left in no
doubt about where the distro comes from, there's no problem. As another
example, when Microsoft incorporated the BSD TCP/IP stack in early
versions of NT, they had to keep the copyright notices in place (the BSD
license basically says you can do anything you want with the code except
claim you wrote it).