A superficially modest blog post from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can’t publish it.
…I don’t see how this is clickbait, this is a major damaging move to downstream distros. They can no longer use RHEL source. Also, I just copy and pasted the original article’s title. RHEL is an extremely influential distro, others will follow its lead.
I actually considered changing it at first because I didn’t think it properly conveyed just how damaging to open source this is. This is an inflection point for the entire space. Red Hat is one of the most influential distros and others will follow its lead.
If you disagree with my take, fair, but tell me why. Same for all the people upvoting @carlyman’s comment. I want to have real discourse with you all, and I will change the title if you have good reasoning that it is in fact inaccurate. Like you said, we don’t want this to be like Reddit.
It’s also against the spirit of the GPL if not the letter. Red Hat isn’t just required to release source code to its customers upon request; that source code comes with GPL rights and restrictions attached (including the right to distribute).
Is it legal for Red Hat to require customers to waive their GPL rights? I don’t think it should be, but I don’t think courts are particularly friendly to copyleft holders.
I will leave this article from the Software Freedom Conservancy which gives an analysis of the legal impact of the new terms of the RHEL CCS distribution in terms of the GPL.
In short, it is as you say, not distributing to the public at large is only a violation of the spirit of the GPL but not an actual legal violation. As for redistribution, the new terms stipulate that RedHat CANNOT STOP YOU from redistributing the code (unless you forgot to remove their icons/artwork/copyrightable stuff), but doing so will put you under consideration for a 30-day notice that your ability to access binaries and sources will be revoked.
Additionally, the SFC has gone ahead and assumed that RedHat will have little inclination to sell a single license to Rocky or Alma for them to them attempt a systematic way to get around their RHEL CCS distribution model. In short, RedHat has come full circle in implementing the full breadth of their hostilities towards downstream projects of their RHEL.
I know RedHat folks justify it as “None of the downstream projects helped patched anything. That the downstream projects were the ones being hostile and RedHat is just finally responding in like.” I think the “none” might be over exaggerated, but RedHat has indeed submitted easily over 90% of the patches to RHEL’s code base. That said, working with the community to help foster more contributions is the correct answer, not taking the ball and going home.
All in all, RedHat is basically allowed to do what it is doing. But everyone is free to not like this path RedHat has taken themselves down. I mean, there’s a lot of “questionable” spirit of FOSS that multiple companies that contribute to open source do with their product. cough Java cough.
It sucks that exercising your rights under the GPL means being punished in turn. I wonder if they’ll address this in a future version of the licence?
Some of the changes in GPLv3 seem to address this type of behavior. There might be some narrow gaps that Red Hat is taking advantage of, but the folks at GNU at least made things harder.
Your comment should be more upvoted. Great info.
Yeah - even if it technically isn’t legal, GPL violators have a long history of getting away with it. IBM has a legal team that’ll scare almost anyone away.
I agree with the sentiment…but hard not to say this isn’t a clickbait title. Let’s not rely on rhetoric…let’s speak with data, details, and specifics to help foster actual discourse and constructive disagreement.
When most people think of clickbait, there is a disconnect between the content presented and the title. There is no such disconnect in this case. Your interpretation of the word is an outlier, and even if I agreed that it was clickbait, you still haven’t convinced me it is a bad thing in this specific scenario.
There is generally some truth to clickbait titles…and the more you agree with it, the less clickbait-y it seems. “Crushing blow” is unnecessary rhetoric in my view (and I’d bet 50 cents AI wrote it).
I’m actually not arguing the intent of the article…rather just how I hope this community raises the bar in discourse.
We clearly have a disconnect here. There’s a reason I always put a quote to act as summary in the description of my article posts, they provide more detail than the title could. At the end of the day, I think providing the original title regardless of its perceived quality is the better option when these posts are glorified links anyways. (I assure you it was not from AI, The Register has pretty high journalistic standards.)
As a very long time reader of The Register, I actually enjoy their headlines. They have always had a tabloid style to them. Even before clickbait was a thing and I have seldom been disappointed at the contents of anything I have clicked on. So agreed, a quality site.
Arstechnica and The Register are my tow oldest daily reads.
Fair enough.
You’re upset that the headline didn’t have data, details and specifics in it?..
I prefer to avoid clickbait titles and discussions around soundbites. If you prefer clickbait titles and rhetoric, so be it. I was hoping for something different.