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Red Hat releases 10.1. They do not have to distribute that to you, nor give you source code, you're no longer a customer.Although without legal teeth, in practice wouldn't this become very challenging to keep enforced? The Acme Linux person would be free to conspire with someone who was still a customer of Red Hat, get the 10.1 source code from them (they too could be banned but that's it), and then go ahead and distribute that. RH would have no way to compel the Acme Linux group to reveal who they got it from, they aren't committing any infringement and neither is whoever gave it to them. RH could try to fingerprint the code they gave each customer, but this would be trivially revealed by getting 2+ sources and doing a diff. If RH was tiny with a tiny customer base of small businesses then that could work, but they're so gigantic and with lots of gigantic business customers with 4/5/6 figure employee counts that preventing anyone so much as employed at any of these businesses from making copies of the code and uploading it wherever seems like quite a lift? Obviously said employees could be fired if caught, RH can try to incentivize customers. But still, with proprietary software at the end of the day there is copyright to fall back on as the big stick at the bottom. Copyright affects incentives not just on possible distributors but also consumers, yes someone purely interested as an end user for free might be happy with pirated software but nobody can build new businesses on it and devs even vaguely in the same field are not going to want to even look at it.
But with OSS someone just anonymously uploading each new version of RHEL isn't committing a copyright violation. Neither is anyone downloading/using/redistributing further. So this seems like it'd be hard to do a foundation of. It sort of has the feel of IBM going through the familiar motions it would with proprietary software, but the underlying foundation makes it all different. Another argument is people just wouldn't want to bother going through the trouble, but that too seems somewhat self-balancing? As-in, the more important RHEL's position is and thus the more valuable it is to RH/IBM, the more incentive people have to keep steadily sharing each new version. Conversely if the rest of the world mostly moved on and RHEL became more like IBM's mainframe stuff (still high profit margin but rarely thought of in day to day work beyond a small sphere these days) then the incentive to leak would shrink, but it wouldn't matter anyway.
It's been awhile but I feel like this sort of debate was had in the early 00s back when copyleft was all fresher, just starting to really break out into big business, and more subject to serious legal challenges. And the conclusion was that (assuming GPL held, which it has) while there are a number of theoretical legal ways to sort-of-if-you-squint do a more traditional (non-service) proprietary model with it, the practical realities of trying to do that without the law on your side would be hard. Guess we'll see how that plays out though with a very powerful player trying it?