[EvanAnderson]

Red Hat can't stop you from exercising your rights under the GPL to redistribute the code. You also can't compel them to do business with you. They've structured their support agreements such that if you do exercise your rights under the GPL they will stop supporting you (and decline to offer you future subscriptions).

The value proposition for RHEL is ostensibly support (and a "throat to choke", for whatever that's actually worth). Red Hat's gamble is that no "legitimate" Red Hat subscriber would risk their support entitlement (and the ability to contract with Red Hat for support in the future) by exercising their rights under the GPL.

It's a clever hack. It runs counter to ideals of Free software (and I find it personally repugnant) but it's clever.

[Arnavion]

To be clear, it's not yet known for certain if the chilling effect of a terminated contract violates the "no further restrictions" clause of the GPL or not. Evidently IBM's lawyers think it doesn't. But it would be good to test it in court first.

[paulryanrogers]

GRSecurity started down this road. IBM though has deeper pockets

[toyg]

More importantly, IBM has the best of the best in terms of lawyers. The likelihood of them ever losing a case is basically nil. They sustained and won a proxy war with Microsoft, when Microsoft was the richest company on the planet.

[bonzini]

It's not grsecurity's idea, it started on the 90s when Spender was in kindergarten or so. It's always been the way free software companies made money.

[zingplex]

Much like GPLv3 was written to counter tivoization, I’d love a GPLv4 to kill what RedHat is doing before they do irreparable the entire free software ecosystem.

[worthless-trash]

In this case, is the change you imagine GPLv4 would say "you cant prevent anyone, at any point from downloading the source code from a project you create" because that is super slippery slope?

I'd also like to ask, what damage do you see this change in behavior doing to free software ecosystem ?

[happymellon]

It seems pretty mad. Apparently Redhat doing all of their work as GPL'ed OpenSource and upstreaming everything so that everyone benefits, and anyone can take the software and build their own, sell it, etc, isn't good enough.

Is literally the only thing that would make people happy is to give away RHEL for free for people to run their production servers on?

[geerlingguy]

Part of the open source social contract is downstreaming too. You can't just take, promise to give back, and then hoard what you've built.

[happymellon]

There is no hording though.

What changes have they made to RHEL that isn't available?

[mackca]

downstreaming ? How is the open source social contract anymore than making source code available?

[geerlingguy]

That's what I mean. Not putting up a EULA dam. They don't have to build CentOS or assist anyone, but they can't block the code from flowing downhill.

[geerlingguy]

The damage is corporations could now determine whether they classify downstream use of open source code as "valuable" or "not valuable", and determine (according to their own rubrics) whether to effectively end the open source gravy train in their own ecosystem, or be a member of the open source community and share alike.

Despite every attempt by Red Hat employees to call out CentOS Stream as being "Red Hat sources", it is not. If they wish to participate in the open source ecosystem, they can't coerce customers (paid or not) into a particular (very proprietary) usage pattern with their software. No matter how many tens/hundreds/thousands of employees they hire to code for open source projects.

[mackca]

So Red Hat is saying that CentOS Stream is how RHEL is built, you are saying it is not. Can you show the difference in packages from CentOS Stream and RHEL? Rocky says they pull packages from CentOS Stream, and with their project goal remaining 1:1 binary compatibility then that must be the case.

[geerlingguy]

So far I have talked to two individual developers who have not been able to reproduce a RHEL 9.2 build only using what's available in Stream.