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> It's particularly funny Agreed. It's especially ironic because Red Hat itself was so precious about reading in an incompatibility re the ZFS-Linux combinati

> It's particularly funny Agreed. It's especially ironic because Red Hat itself was so precious about reading in an incompatibility re the ZFS-Linux combination, and now it's parsing the words of the GPL so closely. > There's a pretty clear argument to be made that RHEL's actions in ending business relationships with any customers would be a restriction stemming from their having exercised their right. Disagree, here, though. An additional restriction on the exercise of rights, might be, "This/your license terminates should you distribute the source packages distributed to you." Future updates and support are not guaranteed in the world of the GPL, are not even mentioned, and, your rights are not restricted, when I refuse to do business with you. You still have a license to the software you received. And you can go do business with SUSE or someone else!

aeadio 3y ago
> your rights are not restricted, when I refuse to do business with you This is the part that I don't think it's so safe to assume. A case can and should be made that my rights are restricted and/or I have experienced genuine harm/damage as a result. You would have to look at the GPL violation and the contract violation separately, each in a vacuum from one another, to argue otherwise. Courts may want to look at the whole picture. This looks very much like a "strings attached" situation on the license of the software. Courts generally do respect the authors' intent when issues of copyright/license infringement are not clear-cut, and the GPL is extremely wordy about what the intent was -- freedom to share and deal in the software, out in the open. Red Hat's own corporate materials on open source acknowledge as much, so that's ammunition for any court battle. They can't claim ignorance of the spirit of open source (or the spirit of the licenses in question). They have been including verbiage about the benefits of openness and public access/development of open source software when selling the very product in question. This seems to be anything but a slam dunk case if really tested in the courts. I think there's a genuinely good chance that somebody with the pockets to challenge this wins and sets a significant precedence for open source.

aeadio 3y ago

> your rights are not restricted, when I refuse to do business with you This is the part that I don't think it's so safe to assume. A case can and should be made that my rights are restricted and/or I have experienced genuine harm/damage as a result. You would have to look at the GPL violation and the contract violation separately, each in a vacuum from one another, to argue otherwise. Courts may want to look at the whole picture. This looks very much like a "strings attached" situation on the license of the software. Courts generally do respect the authors' intent when issues of copyright/license infringement are not clear-cut, and the GPL is extremely wordy about what the intent was -- freedom to share and deal in the software, out in the open. Red Hat's own corporate materials on open source acknowledge as much, so that's ammunition for any court battle. They can't claim ignorance of the spirit of open source (or the spirit of the licenses in question). They have been including verbiage about the benefits of openness and public access/development of open source software when selling the very product in question. This seems to be anything but a slam dunk case if really tested in the courts. I think there's a genuinely good chance that somebody with the pockets to challenge this wins and sets a significant precedence for open source.