What's everyone's take on the current Red Hat kerfuffle?

[j2mcgreg]

From the Distro Watch article:

Red Hat's approach to publishing its source code has meant it has been possible for other organizations to make clones of RHEL which use the same source code and therefore are considered 1:1 compatible (or "bug for bug" compatible) with RHEL. This has given rise to distributions such as Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux OS, Oracle Linux, EuroLinux, and a few others.

Before the Linux community gets it's collective shorts in a knot over Red Hat's announcement, I think that we need to have a real hard look at the business cases of the eleven distros that will be directly affected. If one,or more of them, is repackaging Red Hat's source code without trademarks or attribution (as the DW article infers), and then undercutting Red Hat in the enterprise markets, Red Hat's actions are justified.

[DeepDayze]

They are *after all* owned by IBM...so it is no surprise to me that they are ultra careful and ultra conservative...given the long history of the parent company.

True...IBM zealously guards its IP and now considers the RH sources part of its IP.

[MadMax]

As someone who works with RHEL servers on a daily basis I can say it locks our company into the (actually pretty pricey) Red Hat subscription forever, since the developer for the software that's running on there officially only supports RHEL-based systems. Since they are binary-compatible and we have the know-how to run them without official support, there were ideas to switch to one of the free alternatives in the past, but with this change of events this topic gets thrown out of the window.

On the other hand, IF we had decided to do the switch, we'd have been in big trouble now, since we'd basically need to switch back to RHEL asap. And there are probably some smaller companies who are in just that situation now...

In private I'm actually not the biggest fan of the RHEL/Fedora/RPM based systems (thus Debian-based systems are my mains), so it doesn't affect me too much, but of course the open source community will be missing the input from Red Hat. They contributed a not-so-small part of developments in the Linux ecosystem in the past.

[pbear]

I'd be interested to hear what GNU says, as I think Red Hat's position is a violation of the GPL. Which is to say, I think the Distrowatch article is incorrect. Notably absent from the Red Hat blog posts (and also the DW article) is discussion of the derivative work issue. How much time and money Red Hat spends is irrelevant. Only the copyright holder may produce derivative works. The GPL grants permission to create same, but on condition the derivative work is similarly free (in the permissions sense). It's an inherent limitation of the business model Red Hat chose to follow. Only recently did they (i.e., their legal department) decide they could have their cake and eat it too.

[Adrian]

Based on the DW discussion and comments, Redhat's EULA with their customers has a clause that says unauthorised distribution of the source code enables RH to terminate their contract. Thus, the customer is entitled to ask for the source code and get it. But once they do that, RH can terminate the contract, thus making that customer no longer one, and no longer entitled to further source code.

GPL states:

You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the
rights granted or affirmed under this License.

That "unauthorized distribution of the source code" sounds a lot like "further restriction" to me.

[j2mcgreg]

Based on the DW discussion and comments, Redhat's EULA with their customers has a clause that says unauthorised distribution of the source code enables RH to terminate their contract. Thus, the customer is entitled to ask for the source code and get it. But once they do that, RH can terminate the contract, thus making that customer no longer one, and no longer entitled to further source code.

GPL states:

You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the
rights granted or affirmed under this License.

That "unauthorized distribution of the source code" sounds a lot like "further restriction" to me.

That would only hold true if the entirety of Red Hat's Enterprise version is released under the GPL. Is it?

[pbear]

The more important question is: How much of Red Hat's upstream is released under the GPL and similar 'copyleft' licenses?

[manyroads]

Red Hat???? IBM. Oh them. Yawn....

[Adrian]

Based on the DW discussion and comments, Redhat's EULA with their customers has a clause that says unauthorised distribution of the source code enables RH to terminate their contract. Thus, the customer is entitled to ask for the source code and get it. But once they do that, RH can terminate the contract, thus making that customer no longer one, and no longer entitled to further source code.

GPL states:

You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the
rights granted or affirmed under this License.

That "unauthorized distribution of the source code" sounds a lot like "further restriction" to me.

That would only hold true if the entirety of Red Hat's Enterprise version is released under the GPL. Is it?

I don't think there's a collective license or if it's even possible to do that considering that components can have different licenses, but most of the stuff in a Linux distribution including Red Hat is GPLed. I don't think the problem is with random stuff that light be Apache or MIT some other random license, those are just exceptions anyway. And most of the open source license give clear permission to share code, for example Apache: "You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without modifications, and in Source or Object form" or MIT "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so[...]"

That's the point about Open Source, if you have "open source" license that tells you "you can get the code but than you lose the account if you do something we don't want you to do with it" that's not open source in the common understanding, I think Red Hat is practicing shooting their foot... some of their corporate clients might not care about this stuff, but open source fans will sour at this kind of behavior and will eventually drive less people to Red Hat and even Fedora.

[AK-47]

Speaking of Red Hat shooting their foot, they're about to become even less popular: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40 ... -Telemetry
"Privacy preserving telemetry" - no worries, I'm a vegetarian carnivore.