Mastodawn

aranym Jun 25, 2023

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams | The Register

https://lemmy.name/post/4110

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams | The Register - LemmyName

> A superficially modest blog post [https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream] from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can’t publish it.

carlyman Jun 26, 2023

Can we avoid clickbait titles? Really hoping the Lemmy community is better than what Reddit turned into.

…I don’t see how this is clickbait, this is a major damaging move to downstream distros

13zero Jun 26, 2023

It’s also against the spirit of the GPL if not the letter. Red Hat isn’t just required to release source code to its customers upon request; that source code must be redistributable by customers.

Is it legal for Red Hat to require customers to waive their GPL rights? I don’t think it should be, but I don’t think courts are particularly friendly to copyleft holders.

aranym Jun 26, 2023

You could still see that comment? I accidentally deleted it a while ago and it looks deleted when I visit this post from Beehaw… federation is weird.

IHeartBadCode Jun 26, 2023

I will leave this article from the Software Freedom Conservancy which gives an analysis of the legal impact of the new terms of the RHEL CCS distribution in terms of the GPL.

In short, it is as you say, not distributing to the public at large is only a violation of the spirit of the GPL but not an actual legal violation. As for redistribution, the new terms stipulate that RedHat CANNOT STOP YOU from redistributing the code (unless you forgot to remove their icons/artwork/copyrightable stuff), but doing so will put you under consideration for a 30-day notice that your ability to access binaries and sources will be revoked.

Additionally, the SFC has gone ahead and assumed that RedHat will have little inclination to sell a single license to Rocky or Alma for them to them attempt a systematic way to get around their RHEL CCS distribution model. In short, RedHat has come full circle in implementing the full breadth of their hostilities towards downstream projects of their RHEL.

I know RedHat folks justify it as "None of the downstream projects helped patched anything. That the downstream projects were the ones being hostile and RedHat is just finally responding in like." I think the "none" might be over exaggerated, but RedHat has indeed submitted easily over 90% of the patches to RHEL's code base. That said, working with the community to help foster more contributions is the correct answer, not taking the ball and going home.

All in all, RedHat is basically allowed to do what it is doing. But everyone is free to not like this path RedHat has taken themselves down. I mean, there's a lot of "questionable" spirit of FOSS that multiple companies that contribute to open source do with their product. cough Java cough.

A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

This article was originally published primarily as a response to IBM's Red Hat's change to no longer publish complete, corresponding source (CCS) for RHEL and the prior discontinuation of CentOS Linux (which are related events, as described below). We hope that this will serve as a comprehensive document that discusses the history of Red Hat's RHEL business model, the related source code provisioning, and the GPL compliance issues with RHEL.

Software Freedom Conservancy

JustADirtyLurker Jun 26, 2023

Your comment should be more upvoted. Great info.

🐝🇭🇪🅻🅻🇪🇧🅴🆁🇹🐝Jun 26, 2023

It sucks that exercising your rights under the GPL means being punished in turn. I wonder if they'll address this in a future version of the licence?

carlyman Jun 26, 2023

I agree with the sentiment....but hard not to say this isn't a clickbait title. Let's not rely on rhetoric....let's speak with data, details, and specifics to help foster actual discourse and constructive disagreement.

Geometric7792 Jun 26, 2023

You're upset that the headline didn't have data, details and specifics in it?...

carlyman Jun 26, 2023

I prefer to avoid clickbait titles and discussions around soundbites. If you prefer clickbait titles and rhetoric, so be it. I was hoping for something different.

aranym Jun 26, 2023

When most people think of clickbait, there is a disconnect between the content presented and the title. There is no such disconnect in this case. Your interpretation of the word is an outlier, and even if I agreed that it was clickbait, you still haven’t convinced me why it is a bad thing in this specific scenario.

carlyman Jun 26, 2023

There is generally some truth to clickbait titles...and the more you agree with it, the less clickbait-y it seems. "Crushing blow" is unnecessary rhetoric in my view (and I'd bet 50 cents AI wrote it).

I'm actually not arguing the intent of the article...rather just how I hope this community raises the bar in discourse.

aranym Jun 26, 2023

We clearly have a disconnect here. There’s a reason I always put a quote to act as summary in the description of my article posts, they provide more detail than the title could. At the end of the day, I think providing the original title regardless of its perceived quality is the better option when these posts are glorified links anyways. (I assure you it was not from AI, The Register has pretty high journalistic standards.)

mack123 Jun 26, 2023

As a very long time reader of The Register, I actually enjoy their headlines. They have always had a tabloid style to them. Even before clickbait was a thing and I have seldom been disappointed at the contents of anything I have clicked on. So agreed, a quality site.

Arstechnica and The Register are my tow oldest daily reads.

carlyman Jun 26, 2023

Fair enough.