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They run a cloud VM with a paid RHEL AMI and use it to pull the sources. :-).

Alupis 3y ago
How long until this work-around is "patched" by RH/IBM? This is a big part of the reason there's so much uncertainty in the RHEL community right now...
- adr1an 3y ago
  They would need to stop providing sources to all of their clients using rhel in cloud.. doesn't seem possible
  - Alupis 3y ago
    Could they not change their contract/license and forbid "exporting" or something? IBM is big enough to make an example out of a few unlucky individuals, and compel everyone else to play their way.
    - pg_1234 3y ago
      RH/IBM is bound by a contract where the moment someone spins up one of their VMs, they MUST provide all sources and the recipient is free to redistribute them. If they forbid this they lose the right to use Linux.
      - Alupis 3y ago
        It doesn't work that way, in reality. Not anyone can just bring a suit to compel compliance - and IBM has much deeper pockets anyway. So even if the suit was righteous, it would be dead and buried long before it saw a court room. Additionally, the Kernel is only a tiny portion of the RHEL distribution. There's plenty of proprietary RH/IBM code in RHEL, and a ton of non-GPL'ed software too. Lastly, a RHEL license contract might be updated to explicitly state you are forbidden from distributing RH sources... which would kill Rocky's "work-around" while still being GPL compatible. GPL isn't some magic bullet like some people believe...
        josephcsible 3y ago
        > Not anyone can just bring a suit to compel compliance - and IBM has much deeper pockets anyway. So even if the suit was righteous, it would be dead and buried long before it saw a court room. Unless it's Oracle that sues them.
    - josephcsible 3y ago
      > Could they not change their contract/license and forbid "exporting" or something? Even the people who don't think what they already did was a GPL violation would consider that to be one.
  - lallysingh 3y ago
    And they can't do that without some customer ban list for AMIs
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
Is this true? How is this compatible with what other posters are asserting -- that the issue at hand is that Redhat will kill your contract if you start distributing the sources?
- wmf 3y ago
  When you launch a cloud RHEL VM you don't really have a contract with Red Hat; you have to "agree" to their EULA or whatever, but I don't know if there is any way for AWS to cut off a customer from accessing RHEL. In theory Red Hat could ask AWS to kill your whole AWS account, but would AWS do that?
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    And anyway even if AWS were to shut your account I guess you'd just need another volunteer to spin another AWS VM to start all over again...

How long until this work-around is "patched" by RH/IBM? This is a big part of the reason there's so much uncertainty in the RHEL community right now...

adr1an 3y ago
They would need to stop providing sources to all of their clients using rhel in cloud.. doesn't seem possible
- Alupis 3y ago
  Could they not change their contract/license and forbid "exporting" or something? IBM is big enough to make an example out of a few unlucky individuals, and compel everyone else to play their way.
  - pg_1234 3y ago
    RH/IBM is bound by a contract where the moment someone spins up one of their VMs, they MUST provide all sources and the recipient is free to redistribute them. If they forbid this they lose the right to use Linux.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      It doesn't work that way, in reality. Not anyone can just bring a suit to compel compliance - and IBM has much deeper pockets anyway. So even if the suit was righteous, it would be dead and buried long before it saw a court room. Additionally, the Kernel is only a tiny portion of the RHEL distribution. There's plenty of proprietary RH/IBM code in RHEL, and a ton of non-GPL'ed software too. Lastly, a RHEL license contract might be updated to explicitly state you are forbidden from distributing RH sources... which would kill Rocky's "work-around" while still being GPL compatible. GPL isn't some magic bullet like some people believe...
      - josephcsible 3y ago
        > Not anyone can just bring a suit to compel compliance - and IBM has much deeper pockets anyway. So even if the suit was righteous, it would be dead and buried long before it saw a court room. Unless it's Oracle that sues them.
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    > Could they not change their contract/license and forbid "exporting" or something? Even the people who don't think what they already did was a GPL violation would consider that to be one.
- lallysingh 3y ago
  And they can't do that without some customer ban list for AMIs

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

Is this true? How is this compatible with what other posters are asserting -- that the issue at hand is that Redhat will kill your contract if you start distributing the sources?

wmf 3y ago
When you launch a cloud RHEL VM you don't really have a contract with Red Hat; you have to "agree" to their EULA or whatever, but I don't know if there is any way for AWS to cut off a customer from accessing RHEL. In theory Red Hat could ask AWS to kill your whole AWS account, but would AWS do that?
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  And anyway even if AWS were to shut your account I guess you'd just need another volunteer to spin another AWS VM to start all over again...