Red Hat and the Clone Wars IV: Knives Out | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat and the Clone Wars IV: Knives Out

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16 pointswalterbell10 comments

I've contributed a bit of open source over the years, at least some of which is compiled into RHEL under GPL/LGPL licenses.

Section 8 supposedly gives me the right to terminate the license if they violate section 6, which states you may not impose any further restrictions on the recipient's exercise of the rights granted herein.

It's time to band together and notify our corporate friends.

> which states you may not impose any further restrictions on the recipient's exercise of the rights granted herein.

So "technically" that's not what they are doing. Redhat will happily give any of their customers the source to any GPL binary that customer received from Redhat. This does satisfy the GPL license requirements. Redhat will then immediately terminate their contractual relationship with that customer (i.e. we owe you no more binaries and therefore no more sources AFTER today) if that customer does indeed re-distribute that SRPM.

In other words they are not imposing any restrictions on this specific GPL binary/source pair. They are just ending their contract with you and cutting you off from all future redhat binaries AND sources.

I believe this is a bullshit end-run around the GPL, but whether this intersection of contract law and copyright law actually represents a "restriction" as defined in the GPL is going to 100% be up to a court to decide.

The issue isn't about them refusing to give sources to their customers. It's around placing restrictions on their ability to exercise their rights with those sources under the GPL.

> You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License.

You cannot argue that ending their business relationship as a direct consequence of distributing those sources wasn't a restriction on the user's rights. They can play coy all they want, but nobody's going to believe these two events are unrelated. Their EULA is effectively a set of "additional permissions" as defined in GPL section 7,

> All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further restrictions” within the meaning of section 10 [and therefore invalid]. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

To the extent that interpretation is required, courts are going to try and divine the author/copyright-holder's intent. And the GPL goes to great lengths (even including a lengthy preamble) to spell out that is intent is specifically to enhance freedom and ensure unrestricted access and exercise of rights by users.

Analyses that Red Hat's UELA is not a GPL violation are wrong, both in the moral intent of the license and the literal wording. They are mostly coming from a place of "well tekknukkally" that split hairs over literal wording and semantics, and that's not how the law works.

It's up to players like Alma, Rocky and others to battle it out in court.

I think any court in the land would see it as a restriction. The real question is whether the court will enforce the termination of license.

> terminate their contractual relationship with that customer if that customer does indeed re-distribute that SRPM.

They aren't going that far, the contract language is about termination being triggered by a customer giving the benefits of a RHEL subscription to people who don't already have a RHEL subscription.

I think what RedHat is doing is pretty shitty, but that it is based on something that FOSS should want to preserve; freedom of association/communication, you shouldn't have to associate/communicate with people you aren't already distributing the software to. I am fairly convinced that a license that prevented what RH (and probably grsec) are doing wouldn't be a FSD/OSD/DFSG compliant license.

Various people are saying that the RHEL EULA is not a further restriction. Red Hat's lawyers aren't dumb; they've been at this for 30 years.

One of those analyses:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

A god awful analysis at that.

Since this rubbish was published a lot of people, like Jeff Geerling who spread a lot of misinformation, have come out and said they were wrong and RH isn’t violating the GPL per conversations with actual lawyers.

Not people writing a hit piece who refuse to provide hard facts and instead fills it with opinions and calls it facts.

The analysis I linked to says that RedHat aren't violating the GPL.

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