The question is whether Red Hat's subscriber agreement constitutes a restriction on exercising their GPL'ed rights. You get source to RHEL 8.5. You rebuild it

The question is whether Red Hat's subscriber agreement constitutes a restriction on exercising their GPL'ed rights. You get source to RHEL 8.5. You rebuild it (carefully removing Red Hat marks/logos to avoid being snagged for abusing the trademarks), and Red Hat says "ok, you're done. Go ahead and distribute that all you like, but we're cutting you off." Your rights are intact, but your subscription and access are severed. I've said this elsewhere: I don't think you or anybody really wants a GPL that can be used to force a business to continue its relationship with someone it doesn't want to do business with. What's to stop a company from claiming that their subscription was really terminated for redistributing code and not because they failed to pay their bill or maybe because they were abusive to Red Hat support folks? For that matter, what's to stop Red Hat or another company from removing that from their agreement but continuing to cancel subscriptions (or just refusing to renew) without stating cause? People who think that this GPL provision is going to force Red Hat to just open the floodgates again and continue pushing out exact RHEL release code are likely very, very mistaken. If Red Hat has decided to stick a spoke in the clones' wheels, it can simply release only GPL'ed code and stop releasing any non-GPL'ed code that doesn't require it. The current scenario with the code Red Hat releases to Stream is infinitely better in every way except if all you want to do is rebuild the "bug-for-bug" clones or consume them. As far as I'm concerned it more than meets Red Hat's minimum requirements to comply with the GPL and as a participant in open source. Unlike scores of open core companies, all of Red Hat's features and innovations are being released - the sole thing being held back is exact clones of its product.