I don’t think Red Hat is violating GPL. For sure it’s not violating the legal terms of it (I’m fairly certain the army of lawyers RH and IBM have at their beck and call made sure of that) and I don’t think it’s violating it’s spirit (at least not yet) – they are still contributing any changes and their customers still get access to the source code.

They are absolutely violating the spirit of the GPL. Telling your customers that you will not keep them as customers if they exercise their rights under the GPL is as clear a spiritual violation as it gets. And whether they are violating the letter of the law is an unresolved question.

The way I see it, RH wants to be the only game in town providing service contracts for their own product which is fair game, imho. The problem with Rocky is that they also stand to make money out of the same source code which is the disingenuous part, in my opinion.

The problem is that the software is not “their product.” Free Software is a collective endeavor that RedHat contributes to. It is not a product that belongs to them. The product is the support, and RedHat, by virtue of the GPL and the nature of Free Software, cannot stake an exclusive claim to the support.