[mbakke]

I think we, as free software consumers, have become spoiled by the sheer amount of quality software and distros available for no charge, with all the freedoms, over the past couple decades.

In my eyes this move is perfectly within the spirit of the GPL, which explicitly allows charging for the program. Crucially it makes no promise about future updates.

Red Hat can terminate a subscription for a variety of reasons, not limited to taking all their software to make a competing distribution. However even if they do cancel it, you are still entitled to get the source code of all (GPL) software you aquired up to that point.

It will be funny if RH in a further crackdown decides to not publish sources for non-GPL (MIT/Apache/etc) in the public channels that Rocky et.al. use. Would spark a new fire in the permissive vs copyleft debate.

I actually think this move is beneficial for the free software movement overall. Most/all the sources Red Hat use are still available in upstream repositories, and many other distros package it without Red Hats handcuffs.

[LightFog]

“In my eyes this move is perfectly within the spirit of the GPL” - The original author of the GPL disagrees with you - going from his recent responses.

[LeFantome]

Do you agree with these two statements:

- if Red Hat distributes software to you, they also provide access to the specific code and build instructions to build exactly what they distributed to you yourself

- Red Hat will not, no matter what you do, pursue you for copyright violation for distributing GPL licensed code that you get from them. This is true even if it is one of the many GPL packages that they have substantially written themselves using paid software developers.

Because the above sounds a lot like what the GPL was designed to ensure.

In fact, Red Hat does the above even when the license does not require it ( eg. the large amount of MIT stuff they use in RHEL ).

What angers people is that the following is also true:

Red Hat does not provide you code to their product if they have not distributed their product to you. They provide it only to their subscribers. No license, including the GPL, requires them to do this.

If you break the terms of your subscriber agreement with Red Hat, they will terminate your subscription. One of the consequences of this is that they will not distribute FUTURE software releases to you. As per the GPL, they only provide code to people they distribute software to.

The fury around Red Hat is not that they are actually breaking any of the terns of the GPL ( because they do not ). It is because they will not promise to provide you free copies forever to FUTURE copies of THEIR work after you breach a contract with them.

I am not sure what the “spirit of the GPL” is. Is it that? Because that is nothing like the “values” and “community” that I hear people pretending to care about.

[rossy]

Something you omitted is that one of the ways you can break the terms of your subscriber agreement with Red Hat is to exercise one of the rights guaranteed to you by the GPL, which is the right to take the "specific code and build instructions to build exactly what they distributed to you" and give them to someone else.

Or to put another way, Red Hat dissuade their subscribers from exercising their rights under the GPL with the threat of punishment - the termination of your subscription. The GPL is designed to grant you a right and the Red Hat subscriber agreement is designed to prevent it from being exercised. It really couldn't be clearer that this is against the spirit of the GPL. I don't see any other way to interpret what Red Hat is doing.

[mbakke]

Red Hat (and other) EULAs have always been "against" the GPL. For example by limiting the amount of nodes you can run the software on. What they did now was close a loophole that implicitly said "if you repackage our software and distribute it separately you can ignore everything else in this agreement".

They explicitly acknowledge that the EULA does not impose restrictions on rights granted by the software licenses[0]:

> 1.4 End User and Open Source License Agreements. [...] This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license.

So users are still free to fork and redistribute any code obtained through the subscription. Red Hat just may refuse to do further business if you do so.

To me the "spirit" of the GPL is in collaboration. All of Red Hats software projects are still available in public forges for anyone to fork and contribute. An evil or antisocial move would be to take Ceph, Podman, systemd, etc behind closed doors and require a subscription that terminates if you exercise GPL rights. But that is not what is happening here.

[0] https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...

[LightFog]

Hey don’t shoot the messenger- if you want to say that the person who wrote the GPL’s opinion on its ‘spirit’ is wrong then go ahead https://fossforce.com/2023/10/richard-stallman-talks-red-hat...

[ffgjgf1]

Which wouldn’t be a particularly unreasonable position to take?

e.g. if we think about the US constitution and other similar documents

[LightFog]

Whatever about other aspects of RMS he has been pretty consistent on his opinion on the spirit of the GPL and its relationship with free software since its inception. It has been a common tactic over time to question the spirit of the GPL to fit some other agenda. If others want to claim free software means something else then fine - but the original intentions of the GPL are in black and white.

[LeFantome]

I cannot speak for the “spirit” of the GPL but I can certainly read the text.

If the FSF wants to stop somebody from doing what Red Hat is doing ( which would long term be bad for Free Software in my view ), they are going to have to revise the license.

I guess the GPL4 will just be the next GPL license that the Linux kernel does not adopt as the differences between Free Software and Open Source start to diverge further.

[LightFog]

My reading of it was more ‘I think they shouldn’t do that’ rather than ‘we are going to try to stop them doing that’. A morality vs legality kind of thing.

[LeFantome]

I respect that. I just happen to think Red Hat is in the right morally as well. The right to commercially compete with a company by shamelessly ripping off their product and contributing nothing in return is not something I see as deeply moral. Trying to make that harder feels, to me, like a perfectly ethical thing for Red Hat to do.

And as I said elsewhere, “the code” is not the value that the RHEL clones are trying to rip off and commercialize.