RedHat found a way to get around the GPLv2 license intention with contract law
RedHat found a way to get around the GPLv2 license intention with contract law
Red Hat’s new subscription-only distribution of RHEL skirts GPL compliance and violates the spirit of open source.
They are not getting around anything - they just won't keep you as a customer if you redistribute the patches. But no one is stopping anyone from exercising their rights under the GPL.
There is a lot of talk about their community reputation and really for me as a FLOSS developer this comes from the work of their engineers in the upstream. We don't care about the downstreams because the people that do pay someone to care about it for them. If anything the only real practical difference for us is it makes it harder to include RHEL/RHEL-like distros in our CI loops. However they are big enough to worry about that themselves.
They are violating section 6 of the GPLv2 by adding further restrictions.
But ignoring that, I haven’t heard anyone discussing what could happen once this anti-GPL angle goes beyond Red Hat. What’s going to happen once internet connected IoT devices or say a company like Tesla pull the same technique. If Tesla kills your account for any reason, you lose all your paid for services and your car becomes a brick.