aranymJun 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.

Show threadlivingcoderJun 25, 2023
How does this work with the code license? If this is all fine, doesn't this mean that we should be avoiding the kind of license they're using in the future?
Show threadaranymJun 25, 2023
It’s a GPL violation to not allow their customers to share the source. I’m guessing they’ll reverse that decision within the week.
Show threadchameleon

SF Conservancy analyzed this and found that it's probably legally OK, if very much on the edge of what's allowed. RH doesn't sue you for redistribution or anything, they 'just' terminate the contract and the GPL doesn't force anyone to deal with anyone. It's the same stupid model grsecurity applied some years ago.

But regardless of legality, morally, this is just completely and utterly wrong. I'm not totally surprised post-IBM Red Hat went in this direction, but I'm disappointed and angry anyway.

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
Jun 26, 2023 at 2:13amWeb
Show threadaranymJun 26, 2023

I find it interesting that even the conservancy can’t really say whether or not it’s OK legally definitively. Here’s hoping someone still takes them to court over this, wins, and sets precedence that it’s a violation of the GPL (extremely unlikely, but a guy can dream)

I remember people talking about potential scenarios very similar to this when Red Hat was acquired. They were right.