Re: [PLUG] Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 11:16 AM Joe Rosato via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> https://lwn.net/Articles/935592/
>
>
> I am looking for a nice long drawn out lawyer-ly breakdown on how this works.
>
> From my understanding this is just access, but those who paid redhat for access can post that source? 🤨
>

That would be my guess - at least for anything that is GPL.  Most
don't closely read the terms of the GPL, but there are a bunch of ways
you can satisfy their requirements.

The general principle is that if you give somebody a binary, you have
to make the source available to them as well.  That doesn't mean that
if you give one person a binary, you have to give everybody in the
world the source.

Posting the source on a public website is just a very administratively
simple way to comply with the requirements, and it tends to give
everybody the warm fuzzies.  You don't actually have to do it.

That said, when you offer your customers the source, that source must
be licensed under the GPL, without any further restrictions on what
they do with it, which means that THEY could take that source code and
post it publicly if they wished.

Redhat has made similar changes like this in the past.  I haven't
followed them closely but my understanding is that they used to
publish a giant list of well-annotated kernel patches for their custom
kernels.  They then switched to just publishing the modified sources,
which of course anybody could run a giant diff on, but it could
contain hundreds of patches and you'd have to figure out what went
with what and why.  That might have changed since, but at the time
they were concerned that they were putting a lot of effort into being
at the forefront of kernel development and that other distros were
just piggy-backing on it.  Of course those patches were all upstreamed
so everybody would get them eventually, but RH obviously wanted there
to be a benefit to paying customers.  You could blindly just accept
their kernel, but you couldn't easily just pick and choose patches
that seemed more relevant to you or which were referenced to security
issues.

I don't really have a problem with any of this.  The public still
benefits because most of this stuff does get upstreamed, but RH also
gets a financial benefit from an effective period of exclusivity.
That gives them incentive to keep investing.  You want the companies
that are investing in FOSS to have an advantage over the ones that
just take without giving as much back.  RHEL isn't really my thing,
but we all benefit from it (IMO).

-- 
Rich
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