They are not getting around anything - they just won’t keep you as a customer if you redistribute the patches. But no one is stopping anyone from exercising their rights under the GPL.
There is a lot of talk about their community reputation and really for me as a FLOSS developer this comes from the work of their engineers in the upstream. We don’t care about the downstreams because the people that do pay someone to care about it for them. If anything the only real practical difference for us is it makes it harder to include RHEL/RHEL-like distros in our CI loops. However they are big enough to worry about that themselves.
They are violating section 6 of the GPLv2 by adding further restrictions.
But ignoring that, I haven’t heard anyone discussing what could happen once this anti-GPL angle goes beyond Red Hat. What’s going to happen once internet connected IoT devices or say a company like Tesla pull the same technique. If Tesla kills your account for any reason, you lose all your paid for services and your car becomes a brick.
What further restrictions are they making? You are free to do whatever you want with the source code provided for the binaries they distributed to you.
No, I am no “free” to do whatever I want. I want to distribute that source is strictly allowed under the GPL, but then RH penalizes me for exercising that right by terminating that account. That’s a restriction. How is being penalized for doing what I’m allowed to do not a restriction?
How about yet another angle for you. For example, I download and distribute the source RPM for gcc for the version running on my box. RH terminates my account. Now I want to download and distribute the source RPM for the kernel running on my box. How do I do that with a terminated account?
They are not getting around anything - they just won’t keep you as a customer if you redistribute the patches. But no one is stopping anyone from exercising their rights under the GPL.
There is a lot of talk about their community reputation and really for me as a FLOSS developer this comes from the work of their engineers in the upstream. We don’t care about the downstreams because the people that do pay someone to care about it for them. If anything the only real practical difference for us is it makes it harder to include RHEL/RHEL-like distros in our CI loops. However they are big enough to worry about that themselves.
They are violating section 6 of the GPLv2 by adding further restrictions.
But ignoring that, I haven’t heard anyone discussing what could happen once this anti-GPL angle goes beyond Red Hat. What’s going to happen once internet connected IoT devices or say a company like Tesla pull the same technique. If Tesla kills your account for any reason, you lose all your paid for services and your car becomes a brick.
What further restrictions are they making? You are free to do whatever you want with the source code provided for the binaries they distributed to you.
No, I am no “free” to do whatever I want. I want to distribute that source is strictly allowed under the GPL, but then RH penalizes me for exercising that right by terminating that account. That’s a restriction. How is being penalized for doing what I’m allowed to do not a restriction?
How about yet another angle for you. For example, I download and distribute the source RPM for gcc for the version running on my box. RH terminates my account. Now I want to download and distribute the source RPM for the kernel running on my box. How do I do that with a terminated account?