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I appreciate the additional perspective, it’s tough to say if there are any good or bad guys here. The statements on IBMs role is a little self contradictory by saying they aren’t really involved but are also pressuring them with sales goals.
No matter what loss of consumer choice is depressing news, but it’s hard to disagree with RedHats right to make this decision.
I am with you on it being disappointing for consumer choice. It was really nice to have software that was verified through all the government and industry security standards like FIPS, CIS, STIG, ANSSI, HIPPA, etc, etc, and with automated profiles easily available. I hope that someone can take up that mantle to provide better security models for the public.
This should be non controversial. RH is complying with it's obligations to those that it distributes to. Alma, Rocky, Oracle and Amazon have all built RHEL competitors based on RHEL. Red Hat shouldn't be obligated to do the work for it's commercial competitors. And let's not delude ourselves that RH and IBM are not major contributors to the Linux eco-system upstream. The issue here is that competitors want to have patch for patch RHEL and the back ports from upstream for free.
You are not entitled to a developer's works. If they choose to have you pay for the binaries and include the source with full rights preserved for what you can do with that source, they are providing FLOSS. RHEL after this is still doing better work for the Linux / Libre software space than Ubuntu is by trying to push for vendor lock via snaps in my mind.
While I agree that nobody is entitled to the works of others, I find it both disingenuous and against the spirit of FOSS for Red Hat to lock its code behind a paywall just because it can still use the GPL due to some somewhat sneaky legal maneuvering so it can still call it "open source" by a very narrow technicality. At this point, why even bother? It's all just so slimy.
From a users' perspective, you still have full rights to review, modify, and even redistribute the code. Though, exercising the last one is where RH limits people to the future code and software to its customer. A positive right to the developer's future work is something that would require some kind of funding mechanism, but for the purpose of being Libre/Opensource it was something never guaranteed anyway.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
As we understand it, this contract clearly states that the terms do not intend to contradict any rights to copy, modify, redistribute and/or reinstall the software as many times and as many places as the customer likes (see §1.4). Additionally, though, the contract indicates that if the customer engages in these activities, that Red Hat reserves the right to cancel that contract and make no further contracts with the customer for support and update services. In essence, Red Hat requires their customers to choose between (a) their software freedom and rights, and (b) remaining a Red Hat customer. In some versions of these contracts that we have reviewed, Red Hat even reserves the right to “Review” a customer (effectively a BSA-style audit) to examine how many copies of RHEL are actually installed (see §10) — presumably for the purpose of Red Hat getting the information they need to decide whether to “fire” the customer.
If you contractually limit user rights to redistribute the code, then how can you actually comply with the GPL? Redistribution isn't an optional clause.
They don't, but they won't do further business with you if you choose to do so.
The software and code you have is still fully yours though.