[gigatexal]

I originally had a strong anti-RedHat response to this change. When I thought about it and heard RH's response their sharp change makes sense.

They sell RHEL. It's from what I gather their main source of income. Revenue from this funds things like SystemD, a lot of work in Gnome, many many things that RHEL customers and other users of Linux and desktop Linux benefit from. Of course many contributions to open source/GNU tools come from folks in no way affiliated or paid by RH and RH does use these packages but RH also provides a lot of value.

So it stands to reason, to me at least, that to allow anyone to reskin/respin/or basically just ship a RHEL clone without RH branding that is "100% bug/binary compatible with RHEL" just without the license cost is giving away something you work on for free. No rational business would allow this.

CentOS, Fedora are free. RHEL is not. Makes sense.

[toyg]

How did they survive and thrive for 25+ years then? Rebuilders have always existed.

They've just dialled the "greed" knob a bit higher, that's all.

[mst]

Historically they've generally politely ignored community rebuilders and got a trifle enervated by commercial rebuilders - they changed how they handled distributing kernel code (to a fully patched tree rather than a pristine tree and a stack of patches I -think- from memory) in response to Oracle doing a commercial rebuild.

Exactly what the triggering incident was this time they've been very careful not to officially say (which is likely a better option than the optics of getting into a finger pointing war with a smaller target), and I suspect we won't be able to fully judge their motivations unless/until the details leak and/or are inferred by people close enough to the situation to guess correctly.

[gigatexal]

I don't know for sure but if I had to guess early Linux some 25-years ago didn't have the prevalence of polish it has now at least on the desktop. In the server space it was probably solid. That being said businesses back then were likely leery of running a RH clone with just some Linux staff -- better to pay RH for support.

Nowadays one could probably lean on staff to manage issues and arbitrage that go-it-alone mindset over paying the RH subscription. Now that loop-hole is closed.

[quags]

They sell software though that is mostly licensed under the GPL which has certain requirements regardless of if you give it a way free , support down stream projects financially or make an entire public company around it. I’m not sure if red hat can really stop rebuilds beyond ensuring all their trademarks are removed any more than Debian could suddenly stop ubuntu from using that as their starting point OS. RHEL is not free but as I understand it you are getting support from redhat, potentially some legal protections for another SCO type lawsuit, but you are not paying for Linux. I can’t license red hat Linux and get a non GPL license from red ha can I?

[gigatexal]

Have any law suits from say the FSF or others been filed against Redhat for this action?