A superficially modest blog post from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can’t publish it.
SF Conservancy analyzed this and found that it’s probably legally OK, if very much on the edge of what’s allowed. RH doesn’t sue you for redistribution or anything, they ‘just’ terminate the contract and the GPL doesn’t force anyone to deal with anyone. It’s the same stupid model grsecurity applied some years ago.
But regardless of legality, morally, this is just completely and utterly wrong. I’m not totally surprised post-IBM Red Hat went in this direction, but I’m disappointed and angry anyway.
I find it interesting that even the conservancy can’t really say whether or not it’s OK legally definitively. Here’s hoping someone still takes them to court over this, wins, and sets precedence that it’s a violation of the GPL (extremely unlikely, but a guy can dream)
I remember people talking about potential scenarios very similar to this when Red Hat was acquired. They were right.