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Rocky wants to continue getting RHEL sources via public cloud instances and/or via UBI container images (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 1 year ago by kwozyman to c/[email protected]

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While I disagree with Red Hat's decision to hinder source access, this move from Rocky (a commercial company!) seems even more disingenuous, imho.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

While I disagree with Red Hat’s decision to hinder source access, this move from Rocky (a commercial company!) seems even more disingenuous, imho.

Why on earth is it disingenuous? RedHat is openly stating its intent to violate the GPL. Rocky is telling them "good luck with that." RedHat wants to be the only game in town providing service contracts. Rocky is saying "no thanks; we're sticking around."

[–] kwozyman 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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. And (for now!) it doesn't even seem they are making it super difficult to do so either. 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.

I honestly don't know why Rocky made this announcement, even if their intentions are noble, they do come out as the bad guys in all this mess. They could have simply put out some generic announcement that "we are working towards a legal way" and kept doing what they are doing.

And to be clear: I believe the true people that stand to lose in this are the users and the community. I've been a user of CentOS (the old style, not this new breed of RHEL beta) for a long time and even an occasional Rocky user in recent times, but that will have to change.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] kwozyman 1 points 1 year ago

I really can't comment on the legality aspect, but again, I would assume they asked real law experts before the move. On the morality of it, I can put my 2 cents forward. The way I understand it, companies buy Red Hat for the support, testing and the guarantee that what they buy is stable. And I think that's the product, not the source code. In simpler terms, RH is not selling Apache (for example), they are selling this specific version of Apache, compiled in this specific way, running on this specific version of the kernel etc etc. If someone else comes and sells the exact same thing, but without putting the work towards testing, bugfixing, backporting and whatever else RH does is what we call in the industry a "dick move" :) In the end, why does Oracle/Rocky/Alma want to sell the same exact thing when they could build their own? I think it's because it's extremely expensive to do all that and they just want to do the easy part which is providing support.

And as I was saying in a reply towards someone else: I think all of this is targeting Oracle, not some startup with no customers. But Oracle knows when to shut up, we didn't hear a pip from them in all of this.

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