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Comment by bonzini | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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