Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

Did Red Hat write perl? Any of the GNU coreutils? Any part of the compilers used to produce the binaries?

There is this view that RedHat is somehow doing something so indispensable; but really they are curating a collection of software, written wholly and completely by other people and released under GPL2 or similar licenses.

That somehow this gives them the ability to supercede the licenses that Red Hat, themselves, agreed to when downloading, compiling and distributing the Linux kernel and related software... just seems ridiculous.

So many are commenting, but forgetting that the full measure of legality is seen in courtrooms. It's unlikely that a successful defense in court can be mounted due to IBM's deep pockets, if we are realistic about it.

My hope is that Red Hat gets the full 'Bud Light' treatment instead, and simply ceases to be much of a force in the marketplace.

EDIT to add, here is the actual text of GPL v2 license... https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

>Did Red Hat write perl?

I don't know about Perl, but there was a long stretch of time where the only full-time paid developer of the CPython core team was a Red Hat employee, with all other core team members only able to contribute a few hours a week. I don't think that's the case anymore because IIRC Microsoft is now employing a few, but as far as I know Microsoft and Red Hat are the only two companies with any employees working on Python as a full-time job.

>Any of the GNU coreutils?

Yes

>Any part of the compilers used to produce the binaries?

Red Hat is the primary corporate contributor to GCC, yes. I would guess it's probably also the largest contributor to glibc as well, but if not, it's definitely top 3.

You'll notice that for instance GCC is ahead of Clang on C++23 adoption, and that's largely because Red Hat is paying people to work on it, whereas Google who was a major sponsor of Clang/LLVM work has been decreasing their contributions there.

But Red Hat has also been increasing their contributions to LLVM, too, e.g. https://www.npopov.com/2022/12/20/This-year-in-LLVM-2022.htm...

You've pretty well debunked this, but I took a stroll through the git repos; the commit logs tell the truth.

Python: the latest commit was from a Microsoft employee. Not to mention the creator of Python works for Microsoft now.

GCC: The commit log is overwhelmingly from: RedHat, Suse, Intel, Arm, Oracle (!), IBM and a few indie developers scattered about. I saw maybe one GNU person in the logs at the most.

Sounds like Free Software has gone corporate.... RMS might want to get his suit dry cleaned.

You clearly did not grasp the full meaning of Free Software.

YES actually, Red Hat bought Cygnus a long time ago, and formerly-Cygnus (now RH) devs are huge GCC contributors.

it should be clarified that red hat is not violating gpl license. they are free to repackage software, then sell it closed source, and only distribute the source to its paying customers. this use-case is explicitly endorsed by rms and generally follows the spirit of free software.

That is fine. The problem is redhat is allegedly making business agreements with their customers requiring no redistribution of the code. This is a direct violation of the GPL by denying one of the freedoms it guarantees.

I didn't realize that, cheers!

but how does red hat structure their stuff? I know that gnu projects must surrender their copyright to gnu, in order to prevent future shenanigans. if red hat had their core infrastructure (package manager, package definitions, etc.) copyrighted to red hat, then they can change the license on future releases of red hat to make it restrictive. you're then free to release a gpl source of the packaged code and the red hat specific modifications, since they fall under gpl, but you can't release the scaffolding anymore that make up the rest of the red hat system. I'm not a lawyer, but I've seen this kind of trick pulled on gpl projects before, where version 2 is now bsd/proprietary, while gpl version 1 remains in public access.

(edit: I'm reading the rest of the thread, and it seems there's some confusion about what exactly is in the new red hat contracts.)

Red Hat has never required copyright assignment in any of the projects they have started or came to maintain.

Only one historical exception: Cygwin, basically inertia from the Cygnus acquisition.

Maybe more significantly, Red Hat has only made limited use of CLAs in the past and hasn't used any CLAs for many years now. It's basically corporate policy.

There was one other Cygnus-era one... libgcj, the gcj runtime library. However, Red Hat assigned copyright to the FSF in exchange for them adopting a more permissive license for the GNU Classpath project; one that was eventually selected by Sun when they open-sourced Java.

Ah, that is slightly before my time:)

Isn't Red Hat's position, "You have the freedom to redistribute this code but if you do so, we will sever our relationship with you as a customer of ours, so you won't get any more code." Which might go against the intentions of the GPL but not its actual wording.

I'm sure their lawyers have though out a good defense but it very much does sound like an additional restriction placed on the right to distribute the source. Hopefully Red-Hat will be proven wrong before more companies jump on this.

What is your interpretation of the following text from GPLv2 (I added link to the official text above):

"2 b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."

it's the recursive clause, that applies gplv2 to derivative works. the prescriptive part is "must cause … to be licensed", and nothing else. what is says is that paraphrasing "the work based on program must be licensed at no additional fee under similar terms as the original program". this part is self-contained and doesn't say anything about e.g. copy and distribution.

the copy and distribution clause is only part 3, where you "may" copy and distribute the program (or its derivative work, as per part 2) provided that you either "accompany it with complete … source code" or some means to get the source code from you on demand.

I can't claim this just from reading the license, because I'm not a lawyer, but in rms's reading and in Lessing's reading, the combination of part 1 and part 2 mean, paraphrasing, "if you make derivative work, compile it, and distributed it, you must also provide source code".

That language is referring to copyright permissions (i.e. promising not to sue people for copyright infringement for using or distributing the software in accordance with the GPL). It doesn't refer to providing access.

A trickier thing for Red Hat might be

> You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.

One may argue about how to interpret that with regard to, for example, terminating a business relationship as a result. (I could see arguments on both sides.)

Also, Red Hat's method for complying with section 3 could be a subtle issue, because one of the options for compliance requires promising to provide "any third party" with the source code upon request. I don't know whether Red Hat is using that option or a different option.

>One may argue about how to interpret that with regard to, for example, terminating a business relationship as a result

I think there's been far too little focus on this, which is the crux of it. IMO (an IANAL) it seems pretty clear that even though this is not an explicit new license condition, it de facto does prevent redistribution: i.e. "you can do business with us, but only if you do not exercise one of your rights" in de facto limiting that right

I would love to see this adjudicated. Is there a company that builds statically against RHEL and resells, or modifies RHEL as a paying customer and resells that could show material injury by this move?

Red Hat is not using that option. In fact GPLv3 restricts that option to physical products, which RHEL is not. By distributing the packages via SRPMs, Red Hat has a single method that complies with GPLv2, GPLv3 and also with the attribution requirements of permissive licenses.

I suspect that RH is not complying with the GPLv2. I can use yum to install a package from RH’s repo and it does not result in me having the source, so 3a is out. They don’t offer to distribute source code at cost to any third party, so no 3b. And 3c is non commercial distribution, so that’s out. There is no 3d.

Maybe that's covered as a 3a distribution by this additional language?

> If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.

You only need to enable the companion source repo(s) to get access to the source. To be able to access the binary & source repos via our CDN, you need to be a registered “customer” of Red Hat (which includes no-cost developer account agreements) which then gives credentials to access our CDN. If you have a valid credential to pull binary RPMs, you also have access to pull source RPMs.

> They don’t offer to distribute source code at cost to any third party, so no 3b.

If you are a customer of RHEL, then you do in fact have the ability to request a copy of the source code, including on physical media, and the ability to download it yourself from the customer portal, or from the srpm repositories.

The entire change is that the source code is now only being published in 2 places (CentOS stream and the customer portal) instead of 3 (the following two plus git.centos.org). I suppose it's 3 places instead of 4 if you include the srpm repositories.

Recent versions of RHEL actually include a GPLv2-oriented written offer for source, but this is in addition to Red Hat simultaneously making corresponding source available along with binaries (for all packages regardless of license).

But is it valid for any third party, i.e. does it allow a Red Hat customer to use 3c?

It's explicitly valid for any third party. I would assume that a customer could use it even where (as should normally be the case) the customer would have source code access under 3a.

There are a lot of drawbacks to use of the written offer option so I'm not sure if Red Hat will continue to use it with RHEL in the future.

> trickier thing for Red Hat might be

>> You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein

Is it all that obvious or clear that "if we don't like what you do with our stuff, we will not renew your contract next year or sell you anything anymore" a restriction on the software they already delivered?

The software to which that clause applies was already delivered, and redhat is not, as far as I know, applying any restrictions on that software.

As a company, they are not obliged to sell to anyone who shows up with the sticker price, so this doesn't look, to me, like a restriction on the software itself.

After all, the right to choose your customers is a very basic one that only has few exemptions related to individuals in protected classes.

> Is it all that obvious or clear that "if we don't like what you do with our stuff, we will not renew your contract next year or sell you anything anymore" a restriction on the software they already delivered?

Yes, it's obvious.

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