[harishpillay]

Red Hat "fork[ing] most of the upstream" is not telling the whole story. Yes, Red Hat works with upstream code, does additional QE/QA and certification as needed and make that available to customers on a subscription. Changes, improvements, bugfixes etc are all also sent back upstream. It is a two way street. Not a one way "take from upstream only" model. If that was the model, Red Hat would have not survived to thrive. Upstream First is the default for Red Hat.

Red Hat's code base is a mix of GPLv2/v3, MIT, BSD, Apache - ie, it spans the entire open source licensing spectrum from protective copyleft (GPL) to non-protective (BSD, Apache, MIT). Red Hat is only obligated to release code to GPL code that it ships to customers, but Red Hat goes above and beyond and ships all code that it worked on or otherwise to customers. There is ZERO value in holding back code/fixes etc. Pushing that upstream empowers the whole global community (yes, including competitors). Not doing so will result in fragmentation of the various open source code bases and downstream products.

Trademarks are not the same as copyright. Trademarks tell the receiver who it represents. It is the identity of the entity. So, that is protected and I think that is very fair.

Disclosure: I work for Red Hat.