Or they could put in the work to create their own snowflake distribution, like thousands others on Distrowatch.
And if you're building infrastructure on free software that has dependencies on RHEL, or rather "free RHEL", shame on you. RHEL is for shops with wheelbarrows of money that used to run Solaris or HP/UX and are running proprietary software. What is happening is IT project managers are trying to justify their existence and cut costs, so they switch the contract to Oracle Linux so they can earn that bonus check.
It is business as usual with any of them.
Maybe they should remove their Linux contributions as well, that they have been doing since around 2000.
And “mostly sponsored” is just another way of saying sponsored. Just because you sponsor something does not mean you own it. It does not really give you many rights as I understand. Because you are a sponsor, not an investor.
You make the argument for GCC but that is a piece of GNU which I feel furthers my point. Cool, RHEL put some money into an already free and open piece of software… that makes them exempt from violating the GPL?
edit: Stallman, any thoughts?
They aren't violating the GPL as per legal point of view.
Whatever morals people think should go beyond legal matters is wishful thinking.
Anyone is also welcome to up their game and pay the projects Red-Hat is putting money on.
Whose the first?
I guess I am curious what the legal reasoning is behind them skirting it is.
You're obviously confused as to the terms of the license. Red Hat seems to be fully compliant.
The GPL requires that the distributor place no restriction on redistribution of the sources or binaries by their clients. The subscription agreement, however, is terminated if you exercise this right, despite Red Hat not being allowed to restrict the exercise of this right. This is on the very edge of legality and may be found illegal - they're shifting the consequence somewhere else to say that it's not redistribution that's restricted, but that if you redistribute then they restrict everything else.
This one. Though they can add any restrictions (like asking money for the sources, which GPL is fine with).
You can only ask in exchange for sources for the cost of physically distributing the source, nothing more, and in that case you must offer it to anyone asking at all, even if they do not have the binary. Otherwise, you have to distribute it for free on the same medium as the binary itself.
You can not either add any restriction to the act of distributing the program or it's sources. The GPLv2 says for example "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.". The question is whether or not terminating the subscription is a restriction, which it totally is to any reasonable reading by a layperson, and may be as well in front of a judge.
The value of the code has to exist in really different economies.. London to Algiers so to speak. So there has to be some room for different kinds of deals IMHO
Again -- you've said this elsewhere -- which source and which binaries? RH places no restrictions on the redistribution of source or binaries received pursuant to Section 3 of the GPL. RH simply terminates the business relationship if you decide to build a 1:1 clone. What you're reading into the GPL is a duty not to terminate a business relationship, and to deliver new and distinct sources and binaries, after the business relationship is terminated.
All that said, I will just admit that I am upset with RHEL and need to do some more research into the GPL.
On one side your Red Hat:
- takes non commercial open source and does integration and sells support. Also contributes to a megaton of open source projects across all layers of Linux.
The other you have the rebuilds:
- take Red Hat's commercial but open source work
- does no integration work whatsoever, since RHEL's already done that
- trivial contributions to almost no open source projects that aren't only necessary for their position as a clone
- undercuts RHEL in support offering since they don't have to do practically anything themselves.
So yeah, RHEL is an excellent citizen of open source and the others are just parasitic freeloaders.
RHEL is for big business having bespoke applications; unless you need the stability nobody expects normal open source devs to make RHEL their testbed.
Because that doesn't say anything about stuff running on RHEL, and you can test on Debian just as well so why bother?
Like, why do you care about RHEL at all in a way that isn't covered by CentOS Stream?
I don't test on centos stream because I'm skeptical anyone deploys it to production and code working there wouldn't tell me much about working on RHEL. If my code crashes on their bleeding edge, do I try to fix it or wait to see if something under it is broken? Could waste a lot of time there for zero benefit.
I personally think this is the beginning of the end times for RHEL. It will not survive IBM.