this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I think they'll still be compliant as long as they offer their source to customers. The GPL doesn't require that you make source available to anyone, but to anyone that you distribute binaries to. From the GNU website:
Source: Quick GPLv3 Guide under the More Ways for Developers to Provide Source section.
Of course the GPL also allows redistribution of source code, and Red Hat seems to want to threaten customers who do so.
Yeah, preventing your users from redistribution this is where they might get into trouble and the GPL license would be retracted and thus they would have pirated the software. But someone would need to prove it in court and IBM has a couple of good lawyers.
Maybe I'm missing something; I thought the issue here was that they "aren't" making their source code available. Just modifications to the original code that can be supplied back to the original source. That doesn't cover all derivative work though.