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It's a violation because they placing a contractual restriction on redistribution of sources they've provided to you. GPL is a licensing agreement. Purchasing

It's a violation because they placing a contractual restriction on redistribution of sources they've provided to you. GPL is a licensing agreement. Purchasing RHEL is a licensing agreement. Together they form a single, but incompatible licensing agreement, as the RHEL licensing term would violate the GPL licensing terms.

tmottabr 3y ago
No they are not. You can share if you want and they can do nothing about it. But then can and will ban you as a Red Hat customer and thus you will not have access to future versions. GPL does not mandate they give you access to future versions.
- gcoakes 3y ago
  Both of you seemed to be talking past each other. You were saying RedHat can stop selling to someone. They were saying RedHat can't stop a customer from redistributing the source. If I understand correctly, both are correct. Though, I imagine it just takes one customer to share the source under their GPL rights to open Pandora's Box.
  - tmottabr 3y ago
    The thing is, wording is everything.. In today world everything is a subscription and so is Red Hat.. You buy a subscription from Red Hat and it give you access to a number of RHEL installations as well as related material like the sources for GPL licensed stuff, but those are meant for the benefit of whoever is paying for the subscription. Lets say that i have a software that was developed by a third-party that is designed to run in RHEL that i have a subscription for and this software have a bug that require me to patch something in the RHEL software to fix, i can share the sources with the developer of this software so it allow them to fix it for me and provide me with the patch to apply in my system. This would not breach the subscription because even tough i shared the sources is for my own benefit. The problem is when sharing the sources give the subscription benefits to someone that does not have a subscription, at that point RHEL terms say they can cancel your subscription with 30 days notice. They are not preventing you from sharing the sources, they are preventing you to give someone access the value added by an RH subscription without them having to pay for it. Now, GPL say that you can share the sources.. you can and so RH will not sue you for that.. But they will cancel your subscription and you will loose access to support and updates.. GPL version 3 is even explicit in this, it literally say that it does not require the developer to provide support, warranty or updates. So RH decide to link those things to the requirement of you not providing access to your subscription benefits for others.
    - mbreese 3y ago
      > i can share the sources with the developer of this software so it allow them to fix it for me But is that realistic? Will you be able to convince a third-party to work with RHEL code if they can't actually install a system themselves? You could provide the code for the errant library, but to really test it, the developer would probably like to try it on a full RHEL system. And if that is now difficult to do w/o a RHEL subscription, what's the third-party developer to do? What you'll find is a slow migration away from third-parties supporting RHEL. I'm not sure what the end game here is for IBM, but it makes the entire ecosystem significantly more difficult to work with.

tmottabr 3y ago

No they are not. You can share if you want and they can do nothing about it. But then can and will ban you as a Red Hat customer and thus you will not have access to future versions. GPL does not mandate they give you access to future versions.

gcoakes 3y ago
Both of you seemed to be talking past each other. You were saying RedHat can stop selling to someone. They were saying RedHat can't stop a customer from redistributing the source. If I understand correctly, both are correct. Though, I imagine it just takes one customer to share the source under their GPL rights to open Pandora's Box.
- tmottabr 3y ago
  The thing is, wording is everything.. In today world everything is a subscription and so is Red Hat.. You buy a subscription from Red Hat and it give you access to a number of RHEL installations as well as related material like the sources for GPL licensed stuff, but those are meant for the benefit of whoever is paying for the subscription. Lets say that i have a software that was developed by a third-party that is designed to run in RHEL that i have a subscription for and this software have a bug that require me to patch something in the RHEL software to fix, i can share the sources with the developer of this software so it allow them to fix it for me and provide me with the patch to apply in my system. This would not breach the subscription because even tough i shared the sources is for my own benefit. The problem is when sharing the sources give the subscription benefits to someone that does not have a subscription, at that point RHEL terms say they can cancel your subscription with 30 days notice. They are not preventing you from sharing the sources, they are preventing you to give someone access the value added by an RH subscription without them having to pay for it. Now, GPL say that you can share the sources.. you can and so RH will not sue you for that.. But they will cancel your subscription and you will loose access to support and updates.. GPL version 3 is even explicit in this, it literally say that it does not require the developer to provide support, warranty or updates. So RH decide to link those things to the requirement of you not providing access to your subscription benefits for others.
  - mbreese 3y ago
    > i can share the sources with the developer of this software so it allow them to fix it for me But is that realistic? Will you be able to convince a third-party to work with RHEL code if they can't actually install a system themselves? You could provide the code for the errant library, but to really test it, the developer would probably like to try it on a full RHEL system. And if that is now difficult to do w/o a RHEL subscription, what's the third-party developer to do? What you'll find is a slow migration away from third-parties supporting RHEL. I'm not sure what the end game here is for IBM, but it makes the entire ecosystem significantly more difficult to work with.