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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The problem is that nothing Red Hat has done justifies them breaking the rules.
Have they made tons of contributions back to open source? Yes. Do they need to make money? Yes. Are there organizations and people who are, in essence, freeloading off their work? Yes.
But here's the thing. At the end of the day, they chose to make their project open source and to build it on Linux. And that choice comes with rules that they (and everyone else that have used Linux or other FOSS projects) have to follow, no exceptions. You can argue that their motivations for wanting to do so are understandable all day long. You can argue the GPL is bad and shouldn't work this way. But they still chose this ecosystem.
Now, have they actually violated the GPL? We'll leave that up to the lawyers to decide I guess. But if we're only talking whether they should be allowed to violate the GPL, the answer is absolutely not. If they didn't want RHEL to be open source and stolen by freeloaders they should've made their own operating system with their own license.
Redhat, the organization/company no longer exists. Redhat did those things in the past, and earned a lot of love, respect, and clout. All that is left of that legacy is their contributed code and an IBM product name.
They're only really restricting the packaging files (and associated testing), the vast majority of which was done solely by them. They could theoretically let you download just the source code that they pulled from public git repos, but that wouldn't make a difference because you can already get that elsewhere.