[CaliforniaKarl]

My understanding: Let's say Alma & Rocky purchase one RHEL subscription, and start programmatically downloading Source RPMs (SRPMs). Red Hat finds out. Red Hat says "as per the subscriber agreement, we are unilaterally cancelling your subscription."

Now, let's say Alma & Rocky go back to Red Hat and say "We want the source for these packages we obtained while we had a subscription." I think Red Hat could respond by saying "OK, you last had a subscription on X/X/202X, here are the versions of SRPMs that were in activate at the time your subscription ended. Oh, you want newer SRPMs? Well, too bad, you don't have an active subscription."

Could Red Hat do this? Sure. Would they do this? At this point, probably. Does that go against the letter of the GPLv2? My thinking is no. Does it go against the _spirit_ of the GPLv2? Yes.

[madeofpalk]

I don't think this does violate the spirit of "free as in freedom" GPL.

GPL is pretty straight forward - it sets out to give users of software the freedom to modify and run the software themselves. That's the spirit, and I think Red Hat.

It does violate the spirit of "free as in beer" "open source", however.

[littlestymaar]

> sets out to give users of software the freedom to modify and run the software themselve

No, not just “modify and run”, it's about “modify, run and redistribute without any other restriction than publishing the redistributed code under the same licence”. That's exactly what makes creative common-NC a non-free license by the way.