- are they stopping their contribution of any patches upstream? - the fact that they’re doing all the work to maintain a distribution that they’ve been giving away for free and have since decided to stop doing that should be their choice. No? What am I missing?
Which is a little sad - Red Hat 3 was the first Linux distro I ever tried back in the 90s (came on a CD in the back of Red Hat Linux Unleashed, published by SAMS)
I liked IBM's hardware 20 years ago
I liked AIX up until about 12-15 years ago (still like a couple things AIX will do on POWER gear that no one else seems to be doing elsewhere (but I may be underinformed on the state of AIX vs various alternatives))
But I have not liked IBM as a company for at least a dozen years - they've become even more sales- and management-heavy than they used to be, and, imo, are not doing anything especially "interesting" any more - they're floating on their reputation (which they don't seem to be doing much to even keep steady, let alone improve)
I'm not especially thrilled with Canonical and Ubuntu, but it's a lot better (imo) than its upstream Debian (let the flames flow - it's my opinion, not yours!)
More recently, I've been getting back into OpenSUSE and SLES - loving how very very little has changed since I was using it as my daily driver on servers (and even as a desktop) 15-20 years ago, but also how much better it has gotten (at least on the server side) in the intervening decade and a half since I was last on it routinely
OpenSUSE is very "European" in feel (and no - I don't know how else better to explain that - just like SAP "feels German", SUSE "feels" European (more than German, though it does feel a little German, too) to me)
I still run across some RHEL and Fedora with some clients I work with - but they're not as prevalent as they once were (in my exposure, at least)
Yes, other parts of the distro are subject to different licenses, and if Rocky is right, one can still compile and package up a 1:1 binary release and this is a good thing. I know of at least one substantial product with direction to run it under Red Hat, 'although there are reports that it runs under Fedora too'.
It looks to me that Red Hatters are being careful to follow the open source licenses, as, or course, they carefully follow their binaries so they can be paid for their warranties and the support they provide.
Ah, but that is false. Only a party Y that has received binaries from X can ask X for the source.
If X distributes GPLed binaries to Y, then X must provide sources to Y.
You don't have to provide sources to someone to whom you didn't distribute binaries. If you distributed binaries to Peter, you do not owe Paul source code.
There has to be someone who buys binaries from Red Hat and gets the source; that someone can redistribute the source.
The issue is some alleged threat that Red Hat may supposedly identify the users who do that, and retaliate against them by disabling the accounts that the use for getting those binaries. One can speculate how; for instance they could identify users who are fetching unusual breadth/scope of RHEL source code packages.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html [3.] "b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code,"
QED
As I said, there are other documents, especially in userland, encumbered by other licenses.
First party: the copyright holder, offering the license (e.g. FSF GNU Project, kernel devs, ...).
Second party: person/organization entering into the the license, intending to redistribute (e.g. Red Hat)
Third parties: persons/organizations to whom that licensee intends to redistribute (e.g. people with Red Hat accounts downloading binaries)
I think you're misreading it as the first party being Red Hat, the second party being the Red Hat user, and third parties being internet randos.
From the point of view of the Red Hat user getting the software (e.g. Rock Linux), who wants to provide the software to additional users (Rock Linux users), yes, those users are now third parties. The first party is still the copyright holder. But that is a brand new agreement, not involving Red Hat. Second party is now Rock Linux. Red Hat is out of the picture and bears no obligations toward Rock Linux users, who did not obtain anything from Red Hat.
They won’t be successful in their plan to stop EL clones like Rocky and Oracle Linux.
[Red Hat] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-sour...