I’m curious about what you think on how it will affect the Linux community and distros (especially RHEL based distros like Fedora or Rocky).

  • cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business
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    2 years ago

    This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There’s been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.

    IMO that’s the main driver behind this change: don’t feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.

      • nkey
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        2 years ago

        This was my initial thought as well, but I imagine that would violate the terms of their subscription and Red Hat could just revoke their access going forward.

        • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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          2 years ago

          I doubt it would legal to make that against the terms. It GPL code, Oracle is allowed to access it as they please.

          • nkey
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            2 years ago

            Very true for the GPL code, but Red Hat adds code that isn’t GPL to the distro. So your downstream distros would have to cherry pick that code out.

            • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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              2 years ago

              If the code they’re adding isn’t protected by GPL they no have obligation to release it at all, and with these changes they probably won’t.

          • exu@feditown.com
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            2 years ago

            They could still revoke access. The subscription probably says something like “we can revoke access for any reason”. Most subscriptions do

            • priapus@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              True, but what’s stopping someone from uploading it anonymously? They have to share the code with customers, but that doesn’t mean GPL doesn’t apply to non-customers. Anyone working at these companies can download the source code and upload it online.

    • squidzorz
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      1 year ago

      They didn’t even go that far lol. There’s still Red Hat branding all over the place in Oracle Linux.