I'm personally happy about this whole situation. Not because I agree with RH at all, but because it will accelerate the decline of RHEL and the entire EL ecosystem and mean I have to support those distros less in the future. (In a DevOps capacity, I'm not a contributor.)<p>There is a lot of back and forth as to why RedHat is employing this footgun now. It comes down to them feeling, in part, that they are footing the development labor bill while rebuilders (Oracle Linux, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux) reap the rewards and undercut them on support contracts. The other part is enterprises and SMB running thousands of CentOS/non-subscription EL variants and having a token number of RHEL subscriptions to use for support any time they get into trouble.<p>The real solution to the second problem is to explicitly forbid it within the RHEL support contracts and enforce that. You are either a RHEL shop or you are not. Make it a binary decision. This weird tactic of trying to kill off the customer alternatives is going to just kill off the EL ecosystem in the end. I know I abandoned the EL ecosystem entirely when CentOS Stream became the thing.
> This doesn't restrict your right to share the source code that has been previously provided, since you are still free to do so.<p>You're perfectly free to share the source code. By the way, nice business you have there; shame if something were to happen to it.
The original post got a lot of traction on HN and the number of commenters who were convinced that Red Had was violating the GPL was really incredible. Good on Jeff for writing this.
>4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.<p>I don't know the whole situation, but it sounds like RedHat has created additional licensing terms for their GPL covered software, which would fall foul of 4 above, meaning that RedHat itself may not use any or distribute any of the GPL software it currently distributes?
from a different version of this, re Alma and Rocky<p>the loaded words "freeloader" and to a lesser extent "copycats" .. misses an important aspect of the real lifecycle of GNU/Linux software.. maybe you have heard of a book about tech markets called "crossing the chasm".. one part of that book says that there are easily four layers to participation and customers with tech in some markets.. you can imagine those four yourself because there is more than one valid diagram, but basically developers and their employment or income is innermost, their immediate dependencies for inputs, and their most rabid consumers are second, most customers and business relations of varying flavors third, and then "the Chasm" .. a catchy term to say that getting to those outside the regular channels, is very challenging.<p>So in the RedHat so-called "copycat" case, the immediate downstream fill an important role in getting to the fourth+ layer.. there are more informal, unexpected, temporary or otherwise oddball cases than anyone can imagine. So in a growing and evolving network, the full, paid product from the original brand name source is aided and abetted by these immediate downstream distros. That's not the same as simply counterfeit on black markets. Neither is it low effort, since these two distros Alma and Rocky, show long-term commitment and good skill levels. Those are valuable growth themselves.<p>What this "squeezeplay on the copycats" does is remove growth at the edges for lots of people, and consolidate revenue in the center, at RedHat. This is common knowledge among MBAs, and they do it all the time.
I wish Alma, Rocky - or preferably both — would just fork. i.e. create a roughly parallel stable distribution in the approximate style of RHEL.<p>For my use case, I’d just be interested in the server side stuff, but I don’t know how important desktops are for the RHEL styled distros.<p>But just in case, I’ve started practicing on Debian 12.