this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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If that were accurate, then what Redhat is doing would be fine. The issue is that they've been requiring that their customers not exercise their rights under the GPL to copy or share the source code that Redhat is providing, with the threat of cutting off their support if they do. There's an unsettled argument on whether that is actually a violation of the law that grants them the ability to sell someone else's work in the first place, or merely a gross violation of the spirit that most of the people who authored the source code they're selling would be 100% opposed to. But it's at least one of those things.
This isn't accurate, though. The GPL says nothing about contributing anything back in terms of authoring improvements or making them available. What it says is, you can redistribute our work, or even sell it, but you need to make sure that people who receive it from you also have those rights.
I'm aware that Redhat is comparatively speaking, a huge contributor to the FOSS ecosystem. But, if the amount of code they've written is huge, the amount that people outside Redhat wrote that they're selling is gargantuan. I would be very surprised if as much as 5% of the code they're selling to their customers was anything they authored. If they want to sell the other 95+%, I think it's fair to ask that they obey the licensing that allows them to.
The source code is still available via CentOS Stream though. Does the GPL cover having to give redistribution rights to the exact same code used to replicate a certain build of a product?
It does, and very explicitly and intentionally. What it doesn’t say is that you have to make that source code available publically, just that you have to make it available to those you give or sell the binary to.
What Red Hat is doing is saying you have the full right to the code, and you have the right to redistribute the code. However, if you exercise that right, we’ll pull your license to our binaries and you lose access to code fixes.
That’s probably legal under the GPL, though smarter people than me are arguing it isn’t. However, if those writing GPLv2 had thought of this type of attack at the time, I suspect it wouldn’t be legal under the GPL.
I'm not asking them to make available the exact same code; nothing says they have to make RHEL available to anyone other than their customers. It's conventional in the open source world to do so, but not required, and they've chosen not to because they have this business model of selling GPL software and making it difficult to obtain for free what they're selling.
Trying to make a profit through that business model is fine. Having that as their business model doesn't give them the right to violate the license though. They are threatening their customers if their customers exercise their right to redistribute RHEL (with the apparent goal of making RHEL, the exact product, difficult to obtain for anyone other than their customers -- basically building on other people's work for free, without honoring the terms of free redistribution under which those people made their work available to Redhat for free).
In GPL v2, the relevant text is in section 6: