I'd been wondering when that was going to happen. There's got to be a point when you grow tired of Oracle, Rocky and the like taking customers from you using your very own sources. That said, it didn't seem to be a major issue before the CentOS mess they created all by themselves.
It's important to be accurate when considering the actual situation. With that in mind, please elaborate on the phrase describing "sources" as though they are Red Hat's "very own". Is this honestly the case, or are you forgetting something truly relevant about the sources which Red Hat uses to build its products, and the legal obligations which apply to any users of those sources?
You have to pay RedHat to use its software. Only giving source code to paying customers doesn’t violate the GPL because of this. You only have to release sources to the users of your software.
RedHat has been giving them away to everyone; but they are not legally obligated to do so
To add to this, Red Hat does offers a free developer tier subscription, which allows individuals to download Enterprise Linux free of costs, but with strings attached. One of those strings, somewhere in the fine print is legal language about the restrictions of redistributing the software at the free tier. I'm not clear on the exact details, so I won't elaborate & please don't quote me, but it's my understanding that it's somehow a violation of terms redistribute. I'm not sure how that works with the GPL, and I'm guessing the bits ARE still shareable under the GPL, but the separate contract with Red Hat makes that a breach of contract. The mind boggles.
"Very own" as in you've put in the work to curate, test, and bundle together a ton of disparate software to create a cohesive final product. Let's not pretend that there isn't a ton of value in that which these other companies are taking advantage of.
The game that has been spelled out elsewhere is that the subscription can be terminated for this violation of the subscription terms of service (which is not the same thing as the software license). This termination would prevent you from receiving future versions of binaries or sources.
So, RedHat can satisfy the letter of the law regarding licensing, where source is distributed under GPL to those who received the binaries. With each incremental binary distribution they satisfy the GPL rules and makes source available to the recipient of binaries, but they may cut off a customer as soon as they detect that the customer is actually exercising their full GPL rights. So that customer loses access to future binaries and corresponding sources.
This attitude violates the experience many of us take for granted about free software and the GPL, where we expect a community to be engaging as an equivalence class of members sharing the same rights. But the GPL started with provisions enabling this narrower sense. The source distribution could be offered individually to each recipient of binaries _or_ made generally available to the public independent of any existing exchange of binaries between two parties. So the GPL allowed the recipient to transitively distribute the sources they have received, but does not actually obligate the original distributor to also provide sources to other unrelated parties.
> So the GPL [...] does not actually obligate the original distributor to also provide sources to other unrelated parties.
It seems important to note that the Debian Free Software Guidelines as applied by the Debian project specifically exclude any software that requires providing source to unrelated people this way (the “desert island” and “dissident” tests[1]). In practice, the “unrelated” people in license terms of that kind are usually the original copyright holders.
They can’t, I think, but nothing prevents your support contract (and thus access to subsequent updates in any form) from terminating when you release the source. You can do it, IBM will just refuse to do any more business with you from that point on.
This kind of GPL not-a-workaround always made me feel a bit queasy, but open access to RH code (even if a bit stale and hard as hell to get to build) alleviated that feeling somewhat. I guess it no longer does.
Yes they must abide by the terms of the licenses of the software they redistribute. But they could start licensing the parts they write more restrictively, like RPM spec files. I don't think this will happen given how much back and forth there is between RHEL and Fedora, but IBM is in charge now.
