Red Hat doesn't need to mention it. It's a legal requirement of the GPL... anyone using the binaries has legal right to the source code.
As for Red Hat cancelling users accounts who pull the source build binaries and share it... that'd probably land them in a lawsuit, because as long as that person who originally downloaded the code has the binaries... they are legally entitled to the source for them for as long as they have the binaries.
Furthermore, anyone who shares a binary they build from RH sources... has a legal requirement to share the source onto the next person.
These are precisely the type of issues with the MIT/BSD license that Stallman wanted to address with the GPL.
Red Hat could terminate the dev license... and put RHEL entirely behind a paywall, but they have not stated that they are doing so. And I would imagine that they would get a ton of backlash if they did considering that was how they addressed the reaction the CentOS/CentOS Stream change.
But even if they did that, they still have to provide source to anyone with the binaries. So all it would take is one person buying a license, and then releasing the code.
Even if Red Hat banned that account, there would just be another account to do the same thing again. Red Hat would have to play whack-a-mole to try to stop people from doing that constantly.
As for Red Hat cancelling users accounts who pull the source build binaries and share it... that'd probably land them in a lawsuit, because as long as that person who originally downloaded the code has the binaries... they are legally entitled to the source for them for as long as they have the binaries.
Furthermore, anyone who shares a binary they build from RH sources... has a legal requirement to share the source onto the next person.
These are precisely the type of issues with the MIT/BSD license that Stallman wanted to address with the GPL.
Red Hat could terminate the dev license... and put RHEL entirely behind a paywall, but they have not stated that they are doing so. And I would imagine that they would get a ton of backlash if they did considering that was how they addressed the reaction the CentOS/CentOS Stream change.
But even if they did that, they still have to provide source to anyone with the binaries. So all it would take is one person buying a license, and then releasing the code.
Even if Red Hat banned that account, there would just be another account to do the same thing again. Red Hat would have to play whack-a-mole to try to stop people from doing that constantly.
On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 4:14 PM Philip Wyett <philip.wyett@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 2023-06-21 at 16:10 -0400, JT wrote:
> > I see an impasse here. Why contribute to fedora when Red Hat will lock it down in other
> products?
>
> They literally cannot "Lock it down" due to the GPL. Anyone using RHEL binaries has legal right
> to the code.
> What they seem to have done is limit source code access to those who are actually using RHEL,
> which is all the GPL requires. The GPL does not require you to share source code with every
> person on the planet, only those using your binaries.
> If someone wants the source, they can sign up for a free DEV license for RHEL, and that entitles
> them to the source code for the RHEL things they are using.
>
The Free dev account was never mentioned in the announcement. Can Red Hat confirm it will stay and
those who access srpms, rebuild then for other purposes will not have accounts cancelled?
Regards
Phil
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