[mrweasel]

What exactly prevents Red Hat from adding one or more proprietary components, like a RHEL bootloader, or network manager and simply refusing to share the code for those components?

If Red Hat doesn't back down, I don't see anyway around Rocky, Oracle and Alma doing a fork.

[toyg]

They can't easily do that without really risking to break the gpl. Btw, Rocky, Oracle and Alma cannot fork; their entire value proposition is being RH-compatible. What could happen is a new giant trying to displace RH as the reference Linux platform, poaching significant amounts of devs from RH. That would require years and billions of dollars though.

[mrweasel]

> They can't easily do that without really risking to break the gpl.

Why wouldn't they be able to do that? Sure, they can't patch the kernel or any of the existing stuff, but what would prevent them from writing a Grub replacement or a Red Hat shell? It has to be free of GPL code, but the operating system as a whole isn't what's under the GPL, it's the individual components, some of which aren't GPL, but BSD, MIT, ISC or some other licens.

[toyg]

Red hat does a lot of work in kernel, subsystems, and libraries, where linking is necessary. They can, more or less, happily ignore the legal landscape as long as they stay open, because those licenses are interoperable; the minute they started closing things, they would have to pay a lot of attention not to break gpl constraints.

[rushikesh90]

The whole point of selling RHEL is everything is coming from community and open source and they are making money only for support. If they start closing even a bit of software, they will loose customers to other enterprises like Microsoft

[SSLy]

> What could happen is a new giant trying to displace RH as the reference Linux platform, poaching significant amounts of devs from RH. That would require years and billions of dollars though.

It's not working out that great for the old giants, right? I mean Canonical and SuSE.