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Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

If you are not a user of RHEL, you don't necessarily get access to its source code. It was so far, but it's not a GPL violation if they stop doing so.

Only users do have this right, not bystanders and competitors, eating the income of the service provider.

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To all of you saying this is a GPL violation, I highly doubt a company with the size and pedigree of Red Hat doesn’t have lawyers that thoroughly understand the GPL. I’m not a lawyer, but the way I read it, yes this is against the spirit but not the law.

That being said, I feel like GPLv4 will be here any day now to close this loophole, like they did with the anti-Tivoization clause for v3.

Companies violate the law all of the time. The procedural hurdles of enforcing GPL are significant, to the point where blatent violations normally go unpunished. Assuming someone with standing decides to sue and ends up winning the lawsuit, the punishment is generally minor. Mostly the outcome is that the company must comply going forward.

If you can get years of non-compliance in beforehand, and use that to reshape the market in your favor, why is the fact that a court might eventually tell you that you violated the license a problem?

Wouldn’t Oracle have standing if what Red Hat did was a license violation? Why would they risk that?

There’s an old joke that Oracle is a company of lawyers with a small software engineering department.

Why would Oracle sue them? There is almost nothing for them to gain if they win, and a long and expensive court process regardless.

This move by Red Hat was aimed squarely at them. It makes it much more difficult and expensive for Oracle to make their RHEL clone.

Oracle sues Red Hat for violating one of Oracle's licenses. Red Hat comes into compliance and shares the source of whatever Oracle IP is in RHEL.

I'm sure Oracle can find some IP of theirs in RHEL, but I don't think they own enough to be useful.

Yeah, just OpenJDK, MySQL, and btrfs, nothing important, right?

https://github.com/oracle

But the user would have to be granted the source under the same GPL license which permits redistribution. So disallowing their customers to redistribute the source of the GPL software that you are providing them isn't allowed.

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