I'm pretty sure it's not why it was rebranded; the timing doesn't make sense since the rebranding occurred several years after the trademark coexistence agreement.
The curious question though is why 389 was formerly called Fedora Directory Server. From what I've been told by someone who was around at the time (as I wasn't), it's because Red Hat went through a very brief period where it experimented with using the "Fedora" brand as a sort of general "upstream of Red Hat, sponsored by Red Hat" sort of community brand. This was I think quickly rejected as a bad idea but Fedora Directory Server was apparently the one (for a while) surviving example of the experiment. I imagine that the reason for the rebranding was that it was confusing to use the "Fedora" name at a certain point because the directory server project never really had anything particularly to do with Fedora (apart from the connection to Red Hat).
So first of all IAARHL (and I do a lot of work supporting Fedora) but IANARHTL. That said, I have seen the actual agreement (but many years ago), which predates my arrival at Red Hat by some years, but don't have immediate access to it and am disinclined to hunt down a copy solely because of this thread. However, my recollection of it is that it was quite a bit more specific than the Cornell-UVA paraphrase as to where the parties expected the notice to appear. My further recollection is that it was the Cornell-UVA FEDORA that was not really complying with the letter of the agreement as to that issue, rather than the Fedora Linux Fedora, essentially the opposite of what you're saying. To settle this we'd have to get the agreement and do some Wayback Machine research, which I'm also disinclined to do at the moment.
Now, as to why it's on the Fedora Legal Docs site today, that's because a few years ago we undertook a significant migration of all "legal" content from the basically deprecated Fedora Project wiki to the newly created Fedora Legal Docs site. In general, such material is now much easier to find than it was in the wiki era (where it was spread across multiple wiki pages). I don't know when the trademark notice first came to be placed on the Fedora wiki, which itself didn't always exist, but I believe when Cornell-UVA and Red Hat signed the agreement, Fedora may have still been using a redhat.com site.
Yeah, I believe this is correct from the legal standpoint, and as long as both parties are okay with it, it’s alright with me.
My point is: Fedora is a great project, but it’s also so much more popular than FEDORA (I assume a lot of HN readers haven’t even heard about this second one before). It would be nice to mention them in just a tiny bit more prominent way – say, at the bottom of about page. But it’s really not a big deal either way.
Do you mean Red Hat identifies itself using the phrase "Red Hat, an IBM Company"? Because I don't see any use of this on redhat.com (including that website's corporate "about" content) and if any Red Hatters are using this phrasing (I'm a current Red Hat employee) I haven't been aware of it.
You said "It’s how Red Hat identifies themselves too" but those two articles are not by Red Hat. So ... it's not how Red Hat identifies themselves, though it seems to be how Hashicorp identifies themselves.
> Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
This is a phenomenon in eastern Massachusetts that I've been hearing people talk about for ~25 years. I've heard it hypothesized as an attempt to be hostile to outsiders.
> The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center. The fact these have not been built, in 2025, when Metro transport networks in most cities are now over a century old, is telling.
I'm having trouble imagining where a useful ring line could exist in the New York metropolitan area or within the city itself, given its geography, longstanding commuter movement patterns and other characteristics. Maybe you could have a relatively small ring just in midtown Manhattan?
The Interborough Express is one example. Going from southern Brooklyn on the water up to queens. Previous proposals had it also connecting to the Bronx. If you want to be really ambitious, connect Bayridge to Staten Island and continue on with branches to Elizabeth and Bayonne. Up north, it's surprising there isn't rail from the Bronx, through Manhattan, across the GW Bridge to NJ.
That's not what I'd understand as a "ring" though. I guess something like that could be useful in providing an alternative to what's mostly been car options for travel between Brooklyn and Queens. Edit - your more ambitious idea could be a "ring", yes, but I'm not seeing how it would be especially useful. Why would it be helpful to provide a single line allowing someone in Bayonne to get to Jackson Heights, for example (given what are probably more pressing transportation improvement needs)? As a visionary means of facilitating a longer term integration of eastern New Jersey communities to New York City, maybe.
When I was in law school I took a class on securities regulation taught by Joel Seligman, and I remember looking at his multi-volume treatise which included a letter Gerald Ford sent him reminiscing about the Onion Futures Act.
> Funnily enough, Americans do not use the term solicitor; that's reserved for lawyers working for the government!
It is certainly a rare term in American English. I associate it with the probably now-archaic "NO SOLICITORS" signs, which used to be commonly used in an effort to ward off door-to-door salesmen and such. The specialized usage you are referring to is the use in titles of certain important government lawyers (I'm only aware of this in the federal government). The most famous is the Solicitor General, which is an appointed official in the Department of Justice whose job is mainly to argue on behalf of the government before the US Supreme Court.
The curious question though is why 389 was formerly called Fedora Directory Server. From what I've been told by someone who was around at the time (as I wasn't), it's because Red Hat went through a very brief period where it experimented with using the "Fedora" brand as a sort of general "upstream of Red Hat, sponsored by Red Hat" sort of community brand. This was I think quickly rejected as a bad idea but Fedora Directory Server was apparently the one (for a while) surviving example of the experiment. I imagine that the reason for the rebranding was that it was confusing to use the "Fedora" name at a certain point because the directory server project never really had anything particularly to do with Fedora (apart from the connection to Red Hat).
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