It has been cited by, among others, Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is probably some of the highest praise I've received in my career to date.
I suggest reading that and then if you have further points or questions I will be happy to try to address them.
> customers [...] are under the terms of a contract, which overrides the GPL license of the code itself
Do you have a source for this claim? Why would the contract be legally stronger than the license?
GPL prohibits further restrictions on rights of the code recipient. Contractual terms are sometimes found unlawful/invalid by courts. I guess this question can really be resolved only by a court.
Wow, that is pretty defensive/offensive and dissonant with your post above. You wrote in your article:
> [...] as far as we can see, the Hat is acting perfectly in accordance with the terms of the GPL [...] The key point being is that to obtain those binaries, customers – as well as developers on free accounts – must agree to a license agreement and are under the terms of a contract, which overrides the GPL license of the code itself.
And later here:
> I covered my take on the situation at length [...] if you have further points or questions I will be happy to try to address them.
So, if you were just reporting, and you're happy to address questions, my question is - who did you report there? Who thinks contract overrides the license? Is it you yourself, is it the Register team, or somebody else?
I think that if using that claim at all, you should have reported that this claim is pretty controversial, there are many discussions on the internet that show this.
> Wow, that is pretty defensive/offensive and dissonant with your post above.
Is it? Oh. Er, how?
> You wrote in your article:
> [...] as far as we can see, the Hat is acting perfectly in accordance with the terms of the GPL [...] The key point being is that to obtain those binaries, customers – as well as developers on free accounts – must agree to a license agreement and are under the terms of a contract, which overrides the GPL license of the code itself.
And later here:
> I covered my take on the situation at length [...] if you have further points or questions I will be happy to try to address them.
> So, if you were just reporting, and you're happy to address questions, my question is - who did you report there?
Wow. That is a sweeping request, and while I suppose it's a fair one, I can't directly answer it. I read everything I could find on this subject, from the statements of the various companies involved, the discussions on here, Lobsters, LWN, Phoronix, and multiple mailing lists including Fedora-devel.
I did not keep records on every page and every comment, so no, I can't answer. Not "am unwilling to"; I am unable to.
> Who thinks contract overrides the license?
Red Hat does, as far as I can see.
Red Hat has a lot of lawyers; IBM is even bigger and has more. RH is very careful indeed about exactly what the law says. It doesn't matter how many angry FOSS fans don't like its actions: it, as part of its professional due diligence, had to check first, before it acted, to make sure its actions were legal.
My understanding is, in summary, this:
The Red Hat and SUSE business model is quite simple, and yet quite widely misunderstood.
The companies do not sell software.
The companies sell support services. When a customer buys the support services, that gives the customer access to support, documentation, etc. and it also gives them access to the software, as well as to ongoing future updates to that software.
In other words, maintenance.
The software is GPL. You get it, you get the source. You can do what you want with the source, so no rights have been taken away. But if you distribute that unmodified source, then the company that provided it to you is perfectly at liberty to cancel your contract.
You don't lose anything. You don't lose the software; they can't take it back. You keep it, and you keep any documentation you have as well. But you don't get updates any more, and obviously, you also don't get support.
What you bought is a maintenance contract, and what you lose is the maintenance contract. You did not buy software, and you do not lose software.
Any customer contracts do not affect customers' GPL rights. They only affect the customers' rights to what they paid for: support and maintenance contracts.
I see a lot of entitled angry people who haven't put real thought into what's going on and are angry because something they felt they were entitled to has been taken away... but they were never really entitled to it at all. Realisation of that stings.
But that does not grant any more rights to them.
> I think that if using that claim at all, you should have reported that this claim is pretty controversial, there are many discussions on the internet that show this.
Absolutely. It is highly controversial. However, that doesn't mean that the large numbers of angry people are right. Numbers do not confer correctness.
Millions of people do not believe that human activities are causing the planet to heat up. It still is heating up very fast, and human civilisation will probably collapse very soon as a result.
It doesn't make any difference how many people disbelieve it, or how fervently their belief in whatever bogus nonsense they have picked up from the fossil-fuel industry. They remain just as wrong, and they will die just as soon as a result.
The contract doesn't override or contradict the GPL. The GPL doesn't cover rights to future versions of the software, only the versions customers receive. The contract termination is only for future versions of the software, not the versions customers receive. Also, the contract termination only happens when a customer gives someone who is not a customer the benefit of a subscription, it presumably wouldn't happen in other cases of exercising GPL rights.