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> I really don't understand the outrage from RH cracking down on clones.

I think it's very straightforward. A core tenet of the free software moment is that someone who uses a program (a Red Hat subscriber) should be able to share the source code of that program with their friends (Rocky Linux maintainers) for any purpose (updating Rocky Linux,) but Red Hat are threatening to terminate your subscription if you do that. Regardless of whether that's legal, it's definitely against the spirit of the GPL.

RHEL wouldn't exist as a commercial product if not for 10,000s of unpaid volunteers who contributed to GPL-licensed projects with the understanding that no one would be allowed to do what Red Hat is doing with a product derived from their contributions. Some have argued that Red Hat is owed an exception because of how much they've contributed back to the software they use, but I don't think it's right to say that on behalf of every unpaid contributor. There are definitely some who disagree with what Red Hat is doing.

I think we, as free software consumers, have become spoiled by the sheer amount of quality software and distros available for no charge, with all the freedoms, over the past couple decades.

In my eyes this move is perfectly within the spirit of the GPL, which explicitly allows charging for the program. Crucially it makes no promise about future updates.

Red Hat can terminate a subscription for a variety of reasons, not limited to taking all their software to make a competing distribution. However even if they do cancel it, you are still entitled to get the source code of all (GPL) software you aquired up to that point.

It will be funny if RH in a further crackdown decides to not publish sources for non-GPL (MIT/Apache/etc) in the public channels that Rocky et.al. use. Would spark a new fire in the permissive vs copyleft debate.

I actually think this move is beneficial for the free software movement overall. Most/all the sources Red Hat use are still available in upstream repositories, and many other distros package it without Red Hats handcuffs.

“In my eyes this move is perfectly within the spirit of the GPL” - The original author of the GPL disagrees with you - going from his recent responses.

I cannot speak for the “spirit” of the GPL but I can certainly read the text.

If the FSF wants to stop somebody from doing what Red Hat is doing ( which would long term be bad for Free Software in my view ), they are going to have to revise the license.

I guess the GPL4 will just be the next GPL license that the Linux kernel does not adopt as the differences between Free Software and Open Source start to diverge further.

My reading of it was more ‘I think they shouldn’t do that’ rather than ‘we are going to try to stop them doing that’. A morality vs legality kind of thing.

I respect that. I just happen to think Red Hat is in the right morally as well. The right to commercially compete with a company by shamelessly ripping off their product and contributing nothing in return is not something I see as deeply moral. Trying to make that harder feels, to me, like a perfectly ethical thing for Red Hat to do.

And as I said elsewhere, “the code” is not the value that the RHEL clones are trying to rip off and commercialize.

Do you agree with these two statements:

- if Red Hat distributes software to you, they also provide access to the specific code and build instructions to build exactly what they distributed to you yourself

- Red Hat will not, no matter what you do, pursue you for copyright violation for distributing GPL licensed code that you get from them. This is true even if it is one of the many GPL packages that they have substantially written themselves using paid software developers.

Because the above sounds a lot like what the GPL was designed to ensure.

In fact, Red Hat does the above even when the license does not require it ( eg. the large amount of MIT stuff they use in RHEL ).

What angers people is that the following is also true:

Red Hat does not provide you code to their product if they have not distributed their product to you. They provide it only to their subscribers. No license, including the GPL, requires them to do this.

If you break the terms of your subscriber agreement with Red Hat, they will terminate your subscription. One of the consequences of this is that they will not distribute FUTURE software releases to you. As per the GPL, they only provide code to people they distribute software to.

The fury around Red Hat is not that they are actually breaking any of the terns of the GPL ( because they do not ). It is because they will not promise to provide you free copies forever to FUTURE copies of THEIR work after you breach a contract with them.

I am not sure what the “spirit of the GPL” is. Is it that? Because that is nothing like the “values” and “community” that I hear people pretending to care about.

Hey don’t shoot the messenger- if you want to say that the person who wrote the GPL’s opinion on its ‘spirit’ is wrong then go ahead https://fossforce.com/2023/10/richard-stallman-talks-red-hat...

Which wouldn’t be a particularly unreasonable position to take?

e.g. if we think about the US constitution and other similar documents

Whatever about other aspects of RMS he has been pretty consistent on his opinion on the spirit of the GPL and its relationship with free software since its inception. It has been a common tactic over time to question the spirit of the GPL to fit some other agenda. If others want to claim free software means something else then fine - but the original intentions of the GPL are in black and white.

Something you omitted is that one of the ways you can break the terms of your subscriber agreement with Red Hat is to exercise one of the rights guaranteed to you by the GPL, which is the right to take the "specific code and build instructions to build exactly what they distributed to you" and give them to someone else.

Or to put another way, Red Hat dissuade their subscribers from exercising their rights under the GPL with the threat of punishment - the termination of your subscription. The GPL is designed to grant you a right and the Red Hat subscriber agreement is designed to prevent it from being exercised. It really couldn't be clearer that this is against the spirit of the GPL. I don't see any other way to interpret what Red Hat is doing.

Red Hat (and other) EULAs have always been "against" the GPL. For example by limiting the amount of nodes you can run the software on. What they did now was close a loophole that implicitly said "if you repackage our software and distribute it separately you can ignore everything else in this agreement".

They explicitly acknowledge that the EULA does not impose restrictions on rights granted by the software licenses[0]:

> 1.4 End User and Open Source License Agreements. [...] This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license.

So users are still free to fork and redistribute any code obtained through the subscription. Red Hat just may refuse to do further business if you do so.

To me the "spirit" of the GPL is in collaboration. All of Red Hats software projects are still available in public forges for anyone to fork and contribute. An evil or antisocial move would be to take Ceph, Podman, systemd, etc behind closed doors and require a subscription that terminates if you exercise GPL rights. But that is not what is happening here.

[0] https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...

It is not that straight-forward.

If I did not know any better, I would read in your answer that somehow Red Hat is trying to hoard access to all this software ill-begotten of all this free labour. That is nonsense. Red Hat provides not only entirely free access to all this software, to all this code, not only for the code written by the supposed “10,000s of unpaid volunteers” but also the absolutely massive amount of software that they themselves write and contribute to. They do this in multiple ways—most directly via CentOS Stream. If what you wanted access to was just that, where is the complaint?

What people want to get for free is the immense amount of work that Red Hat puts into curating, testing, and managing the very specific packages that make up RHEL. And what makes this most valuable is the distribution in it’s totalality—-the precise collection of packages and the relationships between them. First point is that a lot ( more than half? ) of the RHEL distribution not covered by the GPL. The second point that it, as an “aggregate” work, is explicitly excluded from the terms of the GPL by the GPL itself. Pull up the text of the GPL and search for “aggregate”.

It is not the code that people want access to and especially not the work of those “unpaid volunteers” as that is readily available. People demanding a “bug for bug” clone of RHEL are demanding to benefit from the immense investment and mountain of work that Red Hat does to produce this aggregate work that goes well beyond the code itself.

Ironically, it is always framed as something to do with “the values of the community” and “the spirit of Open Source” and the “greed” of “commercial interests”. All I see though are people trying to free-ride on the productization part of this Open Source product. It is the people that want “exactly RHEL” without paying for it that are being greedy. The loudest voices are people explicitly trying to commercialize it themselves.

Think about this. Rocky Linux cannot contribute anything to the code. They cannot even fix a bug. If they did, they would break their value proposition of being an “identical” RHEL clone. So, there is no Rocky “community” that is expressing “the values of Open Source”. Rocky is no RHEL fork. They are not even trying to be an equal ( or even junior ) partner in the evolution of the software. The “community” is just a set of Rocky Linux customers. Even if some of them do not pay, that is all they are—consumers ( not contributors ). There are many direct RHEL subscribers that do not pay either after all so not paying does not a community make.

When we describe what these “consumers” want and frame as being a group of contributors ( unpaid volunteers ), it is misleading in my view. It is not just Rocky. The same is true of Oracle and others.

I have a lot of respect for Alma. At least they are actually trying to become a real part of the process and to build an actual community around CentOS and thus RHEL. What they are doing is all they RHEL wanted. Pretending that RHEL is stopping anyone from being a part of an actual extended RHEL community is just wrong. Let’s stop describing it that way.

"I want the 10 year support battle tested code, but without giving you any money"

The idea of Free Software is that users have a right to the sources and have the right to distribute the software (and the source code). Red Hat is using and redistributing a lot of Free Software. So to try to stop people downstream from them to keep distributing the work of Red Hat that depends on Free Software is dead against the core of the idea.

Red Hat is profitable enough, and they do have loads of paying customers. Through CentOS (formerly), Alma, Rocky Linux etc. they also have people who use their stuff for free. This only enhances their corporate and paid-for offerings. What they are trying to do now will only hurt them, and it really isn't right.

Buying subscription and using it to build a distro would be against Red Hat Subscription agreement. I guess you missed all the drama of the summer, when Red Hat made it so.

You're right I did miss the details. Sorry for the inaccurate rant. Good for them. We all benefit from more players in this space, instead of just a bunch of RHEL clones.

You are speaking like somebody from an actual community. That definitely shows you missed the drama.

You are supposed to say that we all have a right to an “exact” unpaid replica of the full RHEL distribution that we will explicitly not modify or improve in any way but instead directly commercialize and monetize. We have the right to do this because the above behaviour embodies “the spirit of Open Source”. If Red Hat tries to stop us, it is because THEY are evil and greedy.

> I think what's really needed is a competitor to RHEL in the scientific computing/HPC space.

No idea how it looks nowadays, however I can tell how it started, back in 2004 when research institutes like CERN, were moving away from Solaris and alongside Fermilab created Scientific Linux based on Red-Hat.

I used to have a stack of pizza box Sun workstations pilled up on my research room.