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

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

On Mon, Jun 26, 2023 at 3:10 AM brent saner via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 2:02 PM Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>>
>> 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).
>>
>
> RHEL gets the majority of their RPM specs and patches (the source in question) from the Fedora => CentOS Stream pipeline. Both are F/OSS-licensed and their SRPMs, SPEC files, and patches are freely distributed. For the Red Hat-specific patches, assuming GPL (the majority of what the software itself as packaged in the distributed RPMs), they must release these patches at the LEAST to customers. These customers cannot be legally restricted from redistributing without risking license violation of the initial software, at that..
> Red Hat does not do much actual unique code aside *from* those patches. Every single product offering they have is based on a fully F/OSS project. (RH Storage? Ceph. RHV? oVirt. RH IDm? FreeIPA. And so forth.)

RH is still the one paying for all that, so they're giving back.  They
wouldn't be paying for the stuff in the free distro if they weren't
getting paid for doing the work to benefit their paid distro.

I mean, by that argument RH isn't restricting anything by making it
hard to get at the RHEL sources, since it is all published elsewhere
anyway, so they could just stop distributing the RHEL source entirely.
I don't think that is actually legally valid as the GPL requires you
to distribute the source of the binary you're shipping, and not say
that everything in it is someplace else but good luck figuring out
what random combination of patches it contains.

> Red Hat products, as outlined above, do not have ANY period of exclusivity. Often they drag a major release behind the F/OSS upstream.

RHEL is exclusively available to RHEL customers, and you can't get the
same thing elsewhere, or at least they don't intend for you to be able
to get it elsewhere.

Yes, they publish all their patches first elsewhere, but they curate
what goes into RHEL.  They backport things to provide more
stability/etc.  They presumably make sure the patches are bug-free
before they hit the RHEL customers.

That kind of curation is certainly a value-add, and clearly their
customers are willing to pay for it.  To some extent if you run
Fedora/CentOS you're paying with your willingness to beta test things,
but the RHEL customers are the ones paying for the work for the most
part.

Now, it might not add value for everybody, and the beauty of this
arrangement is that nobody has to pay a dime to them if they don't
want their services, and you can still get their sources for free one
way or another.

-- 
Rich
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