Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

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>It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out of spite to Centos competitors.

That is a violation of their terms of service and will result in a termination of your subscription unless I'm misreading it (section d):

Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement. Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes: (a) only purchasing or renewing Subscription Services based on some of the total number of Units, (b) splitting or applying one Software Subscription to two or more Units, (c) providing Subscription Services (in whole or in part) to third parties, (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software or (e) using Subscription Services to support or maintain any non-Red Hat Software products without purchasing Subscription Services for each such instance (collectively, “Unauthorized Subscription Services Uses”).

https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...

How does this not violate the GPL?

The GPL says I must give you access to the source along with the binaries, but it doesn't say I need to give you updates indefinitely.

I'm referring to the "You can redistribute the source, but then we'll cancel support" part which appears to be part of the terms and conditions.

It does not. As the other comment in this thread notes there are two agreements in play here: the open source license agreements and Red Hat's Enterprise Agreement. Under no circumstances can Red Hat prevent an entity from sharing their FOSS software, however they can absolutely view that action as a violation of the EA Contract, and terminate the subscription. This doesn't undo the action, but prevents further access to updates and sources.

Why should it violate GPL?

RHEL is obliged to provide source code for their GPL packages.

You ask for source code, you'll get it.

You distribute the source code, RH will terminate the contract with you because they don't want to see you as a customer anymore.

They're free to do business with whoever they want, peeking people who will not distribute RH sources.

Every party is in their right here. That's my understanding.

Red Hat did that for many years. They maintain extended support branches for RHEL which provide fixes for very old software. Those fixes AFAIK were never "leaked" despite the fact that every customer could receive it. If it was as simple as crowd-funding single subscription and then publish all the sources, someone would do it and we would have CentOS Extended LTS.

My Assumption would be Section 1.4 over rides in the case of Source Code which is governed by GPL and implicitly allows redistribution, that is the entire purpose of CopyLeft

So the prohibition on "redistribution" in this context would be on the compiled binaries. i.e you could not pay for a subscription and then mirror the yum repos publicly.

You're conflating your legal right to redistribute the software (they can't sue you) to your contractual right to redistribute (them terminating your support contract).

They cannot sue you for redistributing the software, or claim damages because you did so. They can ABSOLUTELY tell you that your right to the subscription is terminated if you do so.

I am not conflating anything, I am reading section 1.4 of the agreement which specifically 1.4 that says

> Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license

So if the preceding section 1.2(F) and 1.2(G) do prohibit redistribution of SOURCE CODE, then it is in fact limiting your rights under to software code under the terms of an open source license.

1.2(F) and 1.2(G) would limit your right to distribute "software" generally defined a complied code, but not source code.

Yep you can redistribute it. But they can terminate your subscription so they don't have to give you the next round of updates. Basically a new "customer" would have to pop up and leak the sources each time there is an update to a package for a bug-for-bug RHEL clone to exist

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