- cross-posted to:
- yt_tech@lemmy.link
- bofh@group.lt
- cross-posted to:
- yt_tech@lemmy.link
- bofh@group.lt
An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.
An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
They weren’t dying before, but they be might now.
The problem is that the value RHEL provides. For my PERSONAL projects the value is less than the cost of renewing my free license every year from them. For a company shipping a system that will in the field for a decade with minimal updates is completely that must work with minimal downtime the value they are providing is higher than what they charge.
That difference in value by users requires RedHat to balance costs the they can charge against maximizing numbers of users versus income. The catch they are running into is some people they provide little value to will just leave, but those people were providing a lot of value for customers. 100 or so ansible roles that your customers were using is suddenly no longer going to be supported, and eventually likely not to work. That is likely a net negative for value provided to customers and goes against the spirit of open source.
The people using Rocky or Alma are unlikely to see cost of RHEL being worth it. So they will go elsewhere. But having a bigger number of users running on those systems provided value and network effect for RedHat even though they are not paying. That indirect benefit is now lost.
RedHat obviously feels all of that does not provide enough value to justify the cost of possible lost sales. I think they are wrong, but maybe they are right.
Maybe they are violating the GPL which explicitly says you cannot add limitations for users sharing code. From here it sure looks questionable at best, intentionally breaking the license at worst. That will have to be left for someone else to decide.
deleted by creator
If that were accurate, then what Redhat is doing would be fine. The issue is that they’ve been requiring that their customers not exercise their rights under the GPL to copy or share the source code that Redhat is providing, with the threat of cutting off their support if they do. There’s an unsettled argument on whether that is actually a violation of the law that grants them the ability to sell someone else’s work in the first place, or merely a gross violation of the spirit that most of the people who authored the source code they’re selling would be 100% opposed to. But it’s at least one of those things.
This isn’t accurate, though. The GPL says nothing about contributing anything back in terms of authoring improvements or making them available. What it says is, you can redistribute our work, or even sell it, but you need to make sure that people who receive it from you also have those rights.
I’m aware that Redhat is comparatively speaking, a huge contributor to the FOSS ecosystem. But, if the amount of code they’ve written is huge, the amount that people outside Redhat wrote that they’re selling is gargantuan. I would be very surprised if as much as 5% of the code they’re selling to their customers was anything they authored. If they want to sell the other 95+%, I think it’s fair to ask that they obey the licensing that allows them to.
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It does, and very explicitly and intentionally. What it doesn’t say is that you have to make that source code available publically, just that you have to make it available to those you give or sell the binary to.
What Red Hat is doing is saying you have the full right to the code, and you have the right to redistribute the code. However, if you exercise that right, we’ll pull your license to our binaries and you lose access to code fixes.
That’s probably legal under the GPL, though smarter people than me are arguing it isn’t. However, if those writing GPLv2 had thought of this type of attack at the time, I suspect it wouldn’t be legal under the GPL.
I’m not asking them to make available the exact same code; nothing says they have to make RHEL available to anyone other than their customers. It’s conventional in the open source world to do so, but not required, and they’ve chosen not to because they have this business model of selling GPL software and making it difficult to obtain for free what they’re selling.
Trying to make a profit through that business model is fine. Having that as their business model doesn’t give them the right to violate the license though. They are threatening their customers if their customers exercise their right to redistribute RHEL (with the apparent goal of making RHEL, the exact product, difficult to obtain for anyone other than their customers – basically building on other people’s work for free, without honoring the terms of free redistribution under which those people made their work available to Redhat for free).
In GPL v2, the relevant text is in section 6:
Except that Redhat is trying to literally stop one of the four essential freedoms - the freedom to redistribute. Arguably they might actually be breaking the terms of the GPL.
I don’t think they are. You can distribute the corresponding source for your binaries. You just won’t get updates to the binaries (and their corresponding source) afterwards.
Not only will you not get updates (after they end your subscription), but you’ll probably lose access to the entirety of their packages before you can download all of them in the first place.
Well there is a clause about how long source code needs to be available for. I wonder what the actual interaction will be there.
Whether or not they’re violating the letter of the GPL is entirely separate from whether they’re violating its intent. The former is debatable but the latter is absolutely happening here.
deleted by creator
They are specifically and explicitly trying to limit your freedom with regards to redistribution by making it a violation of their EULA to do so.
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The people using RHEL aren’t using CentOS Stream, and they aren’t able to redistribute the actual software they are actively using. I don’t know how to state this any clearer.
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Those snapshots are not CentOS Stream. You are not running CentOS Stream, in the state in which it is provided, when you run a RHEL release. They arent entirely separate, but that’s exaggerating the claim and not what I’m arguing. The people who are using RHEL as provided are not able to redistribute the thing which they are using.
deleted by creator
Scenario:
Now you’re in a situation where you’re entitled to receive the source code, but can’t because they won’t let you.
If this will ever go to court, I suspect RedHat will pursue a “corner case” solution. A canceled account will probably have access to the source code from RedHat *up to that very cancel-date" and you’ll not get a new binary (from them). So it should be mostly legal for them to do so.
However, as long as no trademark of RedHat is violated, distributing individual RHEL binaries (not the full images, they contain trademarked assets) should be fine. So you could receive a binary through that route and be entitled to the source code for it, starting the whole process over again.