I’ve been hearing about it a lot over the last few days, but I don’t exactly understand what’s going on. What’s going on with Red Hat, and how does it affect Linux users?
Red Hat’s source code for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) was previously publicly accessible, even if you were not a customer. Now only customers may get access to the source code (which is allowed by the GPL since source code only has to be delivered to those who have received binaries generated from it). But there are Linux distributions who use Red Hat’s publicly available sources to create RHEL “clones” (in quotation marks because they obviously don’t pretend to be RHEL), except without providing the corporate support one would receive for being a RHEL customer. They do have community forums though.
The superficial issue is that those “clone”-distros would have to either purchase a RHEL license or apply to one of Red Hat’s other programs to access the sources for their own distro. The actual issue is that Red Hat’s terms for being a customer are that they’ll kick you out if you use that code to redistribute your own versions of it (or, god forbid, even create a full distro from it).
Since CentOS proper was killed off years ago, many people who wanted a Red Hat compatible server distro but didn’t want or need commercial support shifted their systems to the aforementioned other “clone”-distros, which are now in danger of disappearing because of that change.
Is Red Hat legally able to do it? Yes. Is it a dick move? Absolutely. Will it help spread the popularity of RHEL or other Red Hat distros? Absolutely not.
You did not mention the acquisition of Redhat by IBM in 2018. At the time, many observers were worried about what IBM would do with Redhat, and always wondered when IBM would go corporate crazy over a company with a model based on open source. So this decision crystalize the doubts that many people had at the time, that IBM would milk Redhat more, and this induce a kind of “Yep, of course they did go corporate crazy!” reaction.
Many people feel burned and don’t want to invest more efforts in a company with this kind of methods (they did not even allow a grace period) and want to jump ship.
Is Red Hat legally able to do it? Yes.
At best that’s extremely debateable. The GPL explicitly precludes placing any other restrictions on receiving the code outside of the ones in the GPL. A paywall to receive code from them is allowed. Terminating access for someone exercising the rights explicitly granted to them by the GPL sure as hell sounds like an additional restriction to me. The entire contract you have to sign to receive the code the first time most definitely is.
It can’t be retroactively amended, that’s not how contract law works. The GPL isn’t something you sign up for and you have to accept updates. It’s a model license that people are free to use instead of writing their own. While a lot of people do license their software under “GPL version X or later”, that is not mandatory and it would severely hurt GPL adoption if it were made mandatory in a future version.
How is it that they can forbid clients from modifying+distributing this GPL code? I would have thought the GPL would always allow reuse and redistribution of GPL code.
EDIT: Ah, someone else addresses this below at 2m17s: https://kbin.social/m/linux/t/103435/Can-someone-ELI5-the-situation-with-Red-Hat-and-CentOS#entry-comment-420884
Is it a dick move? Absolutely.
When this is such a dick move, why has no one cared about SLES not publishing the sources to a openly accessible page?
