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.
What further restrictions are they making? You are free to do whatever you want with the source code provided for the binaries they distributed to you.
No, I am no “free” to do whatever I want. I want to distribute that source is strictly allowed under the GPL, but then RH penalizes me for exercising that right by terminating that account. That’s a restriction. How is being penalized for doing what I’m allowed to do not a restriction?
How about yet another angle for you. For example, I download and distribute the source RPM for gcc for the version running on my box. RH terminates my account. Now I want to download and distribute the source RPM for the kernel running on my box. How do I do that with a terminated account?
Section 6 of the GPLv2 states the following:
Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients’ exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
The way I interpret this, nothing about your ability to “copy, distribute or modify” the code would be violated. “The Program” wouldn’t refer to the live, changing copy; only the copy that you received at that point in time which you are still able to redistribute. I point specifically to the wording of “Each time you redistribute the Program” - since newer versions of the Program are no longer being distributed to you, the terms no longer apply for these newer copies. Neither this section nor any other section forbids you from denying access to binaries.
No, I am no “free” to do whatever I want. I want to distribute that source is strictly allowed under the GPL, but then RH penalizes me for exercising that right by terminating that account. That’s a restriction. How is being penalized for doing what I’m allowed to do not a restriction?
They only said “free to do whatever you want with the source code provided for the binaries they distributed to you”, which is true? You wouldn’t be receiving any further binaries that would require releasing code to you, and you’d still be able to copy/distribute/modify the code that you got up until that point.
How about yet another angle for you. For example, I download and distribute the source RPM for gcc for the version running on my box. RH terminates my account. Now I want to download and distribute the source RPM for the kernel running on my box. How do I do that with a terminated account?
As mentioned above, you’d be perfectly able to redistribute the code associated with the binaries already provided to you. Once your account is terminated, you’d no longer have access to the binaries that you could request the code for.
Please correct me if I’m wrong; IANAL.
