I feel like fedora is pretty accessible at this point. The main speedbump is enabling non-free repos but if you're helping someone install linux for the first time you just tell them to check that box during setup.

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.

Due to their comparative popularity, it makes complete sense to me. You don't have people in HN comments for a new Fedora release going "Wait is this about the Digital Access Project?"

What does "not a good look" even mean in this context? Getting tired of this phrase's overuse tbh. "Think of the optics" fell into disuse and I can't wait for this one to join it.

> not a good look

Directly linked from every page as Legal in the footer. What do you try to say; it almost feels you imply docs.fp.o is obscuring it?

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).