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by heywoodlh 903 days ago
> Does this give Red Hat the right to effectively "close source" the code for RHEL despite contributions from the rest of the community?

Legally, yes. Not sure what the point is you're trying to make.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to use a downstream distribution of Red Hat if they don't like Red Hat's trajectory. If you don't like Red Hat's current objectives with RHEL, it should be as simple as: stop using something downstream of RHEL.
1 comments
yjftsjthsd-h 903 days ago
> Legally, yes. Not sure what the point is you're trying to make.

Legally, no; unless RH is the only copyright holder, they get to follow the same rules as everybody else, and for GPL packages that means not imposing additional restrictions on redistribution of source code.

> If you don't like Red Hat's current objectives with RHEL, it should be as simple as: stop using something downstream of RHEL.

People are fine with being a downstream of RHEL. It's being upstream of RHEL that's the problem; Stream is RHEL Beta by another name.

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dralley 903 days ago
>Legally, no; unless RH is the only copyright holder, they get to follow the same rules as everybody else, and for GPL packages that means not imposing additional restrictions on redistribution of source code.

And there aren't any. "RHEL Linux" isn't GPL licensed, the kernel is, and glibc is, and systemd is, etc. Individually.

The sources for all of those packages (and ones that aren't GPL licensed, for which there is not actually a legal requirement to distribute sources), individually, are available via CentOS Stream just as they ever were.

What Red Hat has stopped doing is providing a git repo containing the exact combination of package sources which collectively make up one particular version of RHEL. Instead, all of the sources are still available, but if you want to rebuild the entire distro you need to figure out which particular versions to use. And that's exactly what Alma Linux does.

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yjftsjthsd-h 903 days ago
> "RHEL Linux" isn't GPL licensed, the kernel is, and glibc is, and systemd is, etc. Individually.

That is why I said "GPL packages", yes.

Okay, so if I buy RHEL, and I download the SRPM for the kernel, and I publish it - which I'm legally entitled to do, what with the kernel package being GPLv2 - is RH not going to terminate my RHEL license?

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dralley 903 days ago
Almost certainly not. I don't think that has even happened with Rocky, for whom they're not just downloading one package.
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