[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...