this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams | The Register (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 year ago by aranym@lemmy.name to c/technology@beehaw.org
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A superficially modest blog post from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can't publish it.

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[–] quaddo@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

From TFA:

Some commentators are pointing out that it's possible to sign up for a free Red Hat Developer account, and obtain the source code legitimately that way. This is perfectly true, but the problem is that the license agreement that you have to sign to get that account prevents you from redistributing the software.

So although the downstream distros could still get hold of the software source code, they can't actually use it. In principle, if they make substantial modifications, they can share those, but the whole raison d'être of RHEL-compatible distros is to avoid major changes and so retain "bug-for-bug compatibility."

Of course, they could take a "publish and be damned" attitude and do it anyway. At best, the likely result is immediate cancellation of their subscription and account. That could work but will result in a cat-and-mouse game: downstream distributors continually opening new free developer accounts, and the Hat potentially retaliating by blueprinting downloads and stomping on violators' accounts. It would not be a sustainable model.

At worst, though, they could face potentially getting sued into oblivion.

ETA the full context.

[–] RandoCalrandian@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

How are those licenses not in violation of GPLv3, which explicitly prohibits all forms of "restriction" on redistribution?

[–] 13zero@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Got it.

I don’t see how that could comply with the terms of the GPL.

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 1 points 1 year ago

I don't think all the code there is GPL. A lot of it is MIT, BSD, Apache, etc.