How is this supposed to work with GPL ? Because anyone owning a copy is free to redistribute sources
I haven’t seen this in person so I can only speculate, but I bet they’ll only provide the sources as a tarball or something instead of a git repo, which will make it a PITA for anyone do actually do anything useful with it. I mean, you could potentially still build a full distro from it, but you wouldn’t be able to feasibly maintain it without the ability to do a sync and merge from upstream. So this way, Red Hat achieves their goal of being able to kill any spinoff distro, whilst still remaining compliant with the GPL.
Additionally, they have to release sources for the projects but not necessarily for things like the spec files or the rpms.
Here’s the source for the kernel . . . .
Thanks I can get that from kernel.org
It’s the part that’s not GPL that’s the value add here.
The plan is to give the source Code to paying customers. This is gpl-compliant.
The concern is that Red Hat terminates your account if you redistribute the source to another party. This feels like an additional restriction placed on the source code, which if it is, would indeed violate the GPL.
Terminating a support contract, in itself, is not a GPL violation. The restrictions only affects the ability to receive future updates.
Edit: Red Hat indeed claims that no GPL violation is happening, yet they inform their customers that sharing updates leads to contract termination, which clearly breaches the GPL at least in spirit: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
Now THIS is a GPL-violation or at least a serious concern and asshole move.
