[kriberg]

IBM can't "kill" Fedora. All the specs files, the assembly mechanisms for the distribution is available online. The community can (and has) forked fedora and keep it going under a new name, if they wanted to.

But this is all backwards.

> Why should IBM maintain rolling updates into Fedora

The better question is why is IBM maintaining rolling updates into Fedora? Because they have a business incentive to do so. As other comments have opined, they get free testing, free feedback of upcoming changes. The community gets a lot in return. RedHat funds so much open source/free(dom) software development it's ludicrous. There's reciprocity here. There's a lot of other distributions also benefiting from RedHat's work, like Debian (and vice versa).

It seems like the community here on HN has gone complete bonkers over this RedHat business decision. We've reached a next level of open source entitlement syndrome.

We are not entitled to use RHEL for free. We are not entitled to repackage RHEL and sell it for free either. We are only entitled to those part of the source code which is covered by copyleft licenses. Are we entitled to the SRPM for those programs? We don't know. The patches applied, sure. How about the spec files to assemble the RPMs? Who knows. But it seems like everybody are demanding that RedHat should keep doing this work and ensure that third parties can keep their business model of reselling said work.

This is probably not a popular opinion, but the community seem to have a deranged take on this situation.

[tremon]

We are only entitled to those part of the source code which is covered by copyleft licenses.

No, we're not. Even for code covered by copyleft licenses, we are only entitled to the source for which we have received a binary. However, once we have received those sources, we should be free to do with them whatever the license allows.

But that last part is what Red Hat is violating, and that's why some people have a deranged take, thank you very much: they use their sales contracts to specifically deny freedoms granted by copyleft licenses.

[babarock]

Think about it this way.

If you as a Red Hat customer redistribute the source code, Red Hat won't sue you. You didn't do anything illegal, you are doing what you are allowed to do.

Nothing in the GPL entitles you to future support from Red Hat, source code of future versions or anything of the sorts.

You're free to do whatever you want with the sources. Red Hat is free to stop business with you at any time. There's nothing contradictory here.

[kriberg]

No, this is conflation everybody is having. You are free to do with the received source as you like, maintaining your rights granted by the GPL.

But the GPL does not compel RedHat to keep you as a customer. There are two separate legal instruments, the license for the source and the terms for RHEL. RedHat are free to chose their customers. We can't force a company to take us on as a customer.

[account42]

You try to lawyer your way out of it as much as you want, it's still going to be a blatant violation of the spirit of the GPL if not the letter.