…this completes what appears to be a decade-long plan by Red Hat to maximize the level of difficulty of those in the community who wish to “trust but verify” that RHEL complies with the GPL agreements. Namely, Red Hat has badly thwarted efforts by entities such as Rocky Linux and Alma Linux. These entities are de-facto the intellectual successors to CentOS Linux project that Red Hat carefully dismantled over the last decade
In essence, Red Hat requires their customers to choose between (a) their software freedom and rights, and (b) remaining a Red Hat customer.
A very good writeup, made me better understand the way Red Hat is creatively interpreting the GPL. I hope they won’t just get away with this and go back to better cooperating with the FOSS community.
Context just before that quote:
As we understand it, this contract clearly states that the terms do not intend to contradict any rights to copy, modify, redistribute and/or reinstall the software as many times and as many places as the customer likes (see §1.4). Additionally, though, the contract indicates that if the customer engages in these activities, that Red Hat reserves the right to cancel that contract and make no further contracts with the customer for support and update services.
This is rich, don’t know how many people are aware of that.
I wonder why SFC doesn’t sue Redhat. Are they afraid of the GPL losing power? I’m not a Redhat user, but I respect the history (before 2014).
There’s nothing to sue for. They have only «broken» the spirit of the GPL, not the letter.
What will happen to an enterprise customer who does decide to share the source code that Red Hat shares with them?
Well, they have the right to terminate your account if you do so. They are just doing some legal gymnastics to get around the true spirit of the GPL
First off, I have never used RHEL or a derivative for more than 5 minutes, and I found it… not very pleasant because you don’t need that level of stability (read: ancient packages) if you’re not in an enterprise environment.
However, saying they’re working around the spirit of the GPL is a stretch I’d say. All the sources for their applications are still available, either on fedora or Stream. Outside a RHEL subscription, it’s not very hard to get a big-compatible distro out of the sources. But the sources are out there. The bigger offender is grsecurity, doing the same thing without any sources whatsoever for non-customers, and morning has happened to them in over 5 years.
If Red Hat adds nothing of value with their distribution, I wonder why people are so eager to have distributions like Alma and Rocky. As I said, I don’t really care about RHEL, but if they’re essential to your operation, consider not only licensing the bare minimum… or make your stack work reliably on other systems (I guess containerization helps a lot with that nowadays)
Screw IBM but I feel like the loudest complainers right now got themselves in a kind of predictable situation. Especially after the acquisition. But my guess is RH is fully in the clear legally. Is it a wise business decision long term? I don’t know. If that loses them money in the longer run, the decision night get reversed.
