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Some further context: - Greg Kurtzer, CIQ's founder and CEO, is the creator of Rocky Linux and the president & owner of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundatio

by ndiddy 2y ago

Some further context: - Greg Kurtzer, CIQ's founder and CEO, is the creator of Rocky Linux and the president & owner of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. - Many of the Rocky Linux maintainers are CIQ employees. - The EULA for CIQ's commercial version of Rocky Linux is just as restrictive as the terms that Red Hat used to cut off RHEL source code availability. Notably, there's a section saying that customers may not "provide, license, sublicense, sell, resell, rent, lease, share, lend, or otherwise transfer or make available the Software to any third parties, except as expressly permitted by Ctrl IQ in writing".

the_real_swa 2y ago
https://ciq.com/legal/eula/rocky-linux-from-ciq/ https://ciq.com/legal/eula/rocky-linux-from-ciq/ " .... The license granted in this Section 4 is conditioned upon Customer’s and its Authorized Users ’compliance with this Agreement. To the extent that the Software provided to you is not under an open source license, ...." missed that part? Now check the RHEL EULA wrt distributing the SOURCES of the FOSS based binaries.
- ndiddy 2y ago
  Welcome to Hacker News, I'm glad my comment encouraged you to join the site :) RHEL's EULA has a similar sentence, "This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license." That's what I meant by "just as restrictive". Both services are subscriptions where continued access to the software provided by the subscription is conditional on the subscriber not giving third parties access to the service. CIQ's EULA also says that subscribers may not "access the Software in order to build a competitive product or services", which seems ironic considering their business model.
  - the_real_swa 2y ago
    Yet RH publicly threatened to close your account/subscriptions when you DO exercise the rights of FOSS binaries if you download and redistribute the sources. This is different than giving 3rd parties access to the mentioned SERVICE [that would be equivalent to sharing your user name and passwords]. CIQ on the other hand actively distributes the sources of Rocky via the OpenELA and other githubs [Warewulf etc.]. Needless to say, but the GPL is about your rights downstream and not 'look we have upstream policies first [in Stream] but if you do redistribute sources of GPL stuff, your account is gone!'. No comparison in my book. Finally, logically, if you still find otherwise, then if CIQ is wrong then also RH is wrong and then also put the onus on BOTH.

by ndiddy 2y ago

the_real_swa 2y ago

https://ciq.com/legal/eula/rocky-linux-from-ciq/ https://ciq.com/legal/eula/rocky-linux-from-ciq/ " .... The license granted in this Section 4 is conditioned upon Customer’s and its Authorized Users ’compliance with this Agreement. To the extent that the Software provided to you is not under an open source license, ...." missed that part? Now check the RHEL EULA wrt distributing the SOURCES of the FOSS based binaries.

ndiddy 2y ago
Welcome to Hacker News, I'm glad my comment encouraged you to join the site :) RHEL's EULA has a similar sentence, "This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license." That's what I meant by "just as restrictive". Both services are subscriptions where continued access to the software provided by the subscription is conditional on the subscriber not giving third parties access to the service. CIQ's EULA also says that subscribers may not "access the Software in order to build a competitive product or services", which seems ironic considering their business model.
- the_real_swa 2y ago
  Yet RH publicly threatened to close your account/subscriptions when you DO exercise the rights of FOSS binaries if you download and redistribute the sources. This is different than giving 3rd parties access to the mentioned SERVICE [that would be equivalent to sharing your user name and passwords]. CIQ on the other hand actively distributes the sources of Rocky via the OpenELA and other githubs [Warewulf etc.]. Needless to say, but the GPL is about your rights downstream and not 'look we have upstream policies first [in Stream] but if you do redistribute sources of GPL stuff, your account is gone!'. No comparison in my book. Finally, logically, if you still find otherwise, then if CIQ is wrong then also RH is wrong and then also put the onus on BOTH.