Seems like IBM is going to make RHEL closed source. What’s everyone’s opinion about the move? I feel RHEL is now the evil villain distro of the community.

  • drspod@lemmy.ml
    201·
    1 year ago

    and will prosecute any customers who distribute the code

    Have they actually stated this, or is it just an opinion? Because my understanding of the GPL is that it would violate the license to put that restriction on their customers.

    • bobthecowboy@lemmy.world
      151·
      1 year ago

      I worked for a fairly large tech company (not a household name, but well known in it’s sector) and this was their policy for core business IP related changes GPL things. Modified GPL sources were neatly packaged up and available but it was a violation of the support contract to share them.

      It ultimately doesn’t matter (to those customers) if it’s a violation of the license - the customers were large businesses who were not going to risk an expensive court case without a clear victory against a company they’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) in, on some moral crusade.

      I’m not defending it (and I did not enjoy working for said company), just saying that this model already exists.

      Edit: I should also say that I have no idea if that’s going to be RedHats policy, but it would make sense if it were.

    • Affine Connection@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      It’s not like the entire operating system is GPL. The customers are obviously free to redistribute the source for the free software components.

      • Bel - [Space] Lion
        1·
        1 year ago

        Another poster brought this up. The tooling used to construct the distribution itself isn’t GPL code.

        Couldn’t it be that RH are taking about banning accounts that share non-GPL code from their distribution? Given their upstream contribution history, it seems unlikely to me that they would throw a fit over GPL source files they probably already distributed in some form in CentOS Stream.

        Earning cash on free software code isn’t a crime. RH clearly is frustrated with the existence of Oracle EL etc al, and want to make it more difficult for enterprise competitors to leverage their person-hours. As long as they continue to share source with the people given access to the binaries, I’ll keep an open mind about this change.