[protomyth]

Thanks for the answer. Is the removal of the context of the changes generally considered acceptable? We have a Red Hat license, but frankly, I am more a BSD person and our use of Red Hat is a requirement for specific programs.

[SwellJoe]

Yes, it is well-understood to be acceptable. In the past, most commercial Linux distributions were developed behind closed doors in private revision control and pushed out as "complete" source packages. We had these conversations back then (~20 years ago), and the community and the companies involved came to mostly agree about what is and isn't OK. That's opened up a lot in recent years, such that these days "open source" usually means, "we have a public git repository", but it does not have to.

The GPL provides you some basic rights: you can request the source in a usable form, you can change it, you can redistribute it under the same terms.

It does not require access to the process that produced the software.

These days, Red Hat develops almost everything way out in the open. Contrary to all of the talk in this thread where folks (mostly just one guy, actually) keeps implying RH are violating the license or making it hard to get and distribute source, you can see discussions and the actual code being worked on months in advance of what will be in RHEL by following Fedora development. Fedora is developed entirely in public repositories and mailing lists, and it is where much of RHEL development takes place (RHEL trails Fedora by about 12 to 18 months, in terms of versions, and things that will be in RHEL next year are in Fedora today). Red Hat is an excellent OSS company who do damned near everything right, IMHO. Any complaints I might have about some of their practices (like I said elsewhere, I liked having a kernel SRPM that was the mainline kernel plus listed patches, and I miss it being that way) pale in comparison to the good they do for the OSS community.

Just because they make a lot of money doesn't mean they're cheating the community out of anything.