Technology

37708 readers

422 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

Los@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams | The Register (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 year ago by aranym@lemmy.name to c/technology@beehaw.org

94 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A superficially modest blog post from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can't publish it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] aranym@lemmy.name 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Another excerpt from the GPLv3 that explicitly describes and disallows what Red Hat is doing - you are explicitly not allowed to add any restrictions when you redistribute GPLv3 licensed software:

If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

....aaand an additional excerpt which disallows Red Hat's restrictions:

Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License.

(note: "original licensors" is not Red Hat regarding any software other than their own. Red Hat cannot change or infringe upon rights received from upstream.)

and ANOTHER excerpt:

If you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code.

[–] brie@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What if they technically allow redistribution, but terminate access to recieving updates for doing so? So you can distribute a copy of version N, but if you do so you will not recieve version N+1, and therefore will not be able to get source code for version N+1. Not sure if this is how it is in their contract though.

[–] aranym@lemmy.name 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It could be argued that is also a restriction disallowed by the GPL (in my mind any terms that bring negative consequences for expressing your rights given by the license are restrictions), but at that point it's really beyond my expertise on this subject. I'm not sure if the GPLv3 even defines this at all - maybe Red Hat is banking on that ambiguity.

[–] 13zero@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

They might also be banking on GPLv3 contributors being unable/unwilling to take them to court. The Linux kernel is GPLv2, and its contributors are probably more of a legal threat than anything else in RHEL.