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Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb? | Jeff Geerling
(www.jeffgeerling.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Linux
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Ok hold up… so, Red Hat is locking sources behind a subscription? Is this not a GPL violation?
Edit The SFC has released a comprehensive analysis of the GPL issues related to this news: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
As I understand it, no. I could be all wet, but RedHat isn't under any obligation, I don't think, to provide their sources to anybody that wants them, and is perfectly within their rights to only provide them to "customers" under the GPL. They just aren't allowed to withhold them from those same "customers".
But I'm not any sort of expert on opensource licensing.
You still get access to the sources if you get a binary at all, every subscription (even the free dev one) includes them, but if you redistribute the sources and Red Hat finds out, you're not allowed to be a customer anymore according to their agreement.
Scummy as hell but apparently OK, since you have all the GPL rights. This feels like something a newer copyleft license should probably address.... either way, scummy as hell, especially because one of the arguments used by Red Hat people to defend the CentOS Stream change was that you could still build from the source RPMs.
That’s incredibly disheartening to hear. Oracle and IBM really do just destroy everything that’s good in this world, don’t they…