Red Hat paywall open source code - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 06:42:48 am
content: Huge Open Source DramaJeff GeerlingNot illegal, not nice either. From the video's author:Quote

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 06:50:56 am
content: Yeah, it's a tough one. We've seen this happen on a smaller scale in the Linux com before. I've been wondering how long it would take Shuttleworth and the Arch folks to put a stop to, what is essentially, re-skinning.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 07:38:39 am
content: While it is free and open to do so, subscribing to this thread.

author: newbrain
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 09:36:17 am
content: The GPL states thatyour customersmust have access to the source code, and that's what Redhat is doing.Up to this point, horrible move but respecting the letter of the license.This still leves open the loophole of a subscriber redistributing the code, as explicitly allowed by the GPL (and encouraged, I would add).What isvery, verystrange is that - according to Geerling, at least - they are threatening subscribers that redistribute the code with termination of their subscription.Now, that seems to me a no-no for GPL (TINLA, IANAL), as it's burdening the code with additional licensing condition (Section 6 of GPLv2 and section 10 of GPLv3), meaning that Redhat would lose the right to distribution and use (but customers would not!).It would take just one brave RH subscriber to test this in court(s).EtA: for people like me who hate watching a video when a short article would do,here is J.Geerling poston his blog.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 10:03:02 am
content: Quote from: newbrain on June 28, 2023, 09:36:17 amI fully agree: it is a violation of the GPL to try and stop customers from redistributing the source code.There is nothing wrong in providing GPL'd sources to only paying customers, but placing any restrictions on top of GPL is a no-no, violating the GPL itself. And since Red Hat does not own the copyrights, they do seem to be in violation of the GPL.Red Hat, violating GPL: whodathunkit? Looking their business model for the last ten years or so, I am actually not at all surprised.Quote from: newbrain on June 28, 2023, 09:36:17 amI haven't checked if any of the already resolvedGPL court cases in Europehave had any similar facets, but Red Hat being owned by IBM, I bet a court case in the USA would be necessary to resolve the issue for good.

author: beanflying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 10:06:57 am
content: Isn't the restriction just the Enterprise part of it? Some of this seems completely overblown at least 'for now' as far as the 'average' user is concerned and is more about bleating over open source.Several clickbait titles have shown up on YouTube in the last week but the Enterprise bit has been known for months.No Surprise here either Oracle is playing in the spacehttps://www.thesoftwarereport.com/red-hat-and-oracle-expand-partnership-to-include-red-hat-enterprise-linux-on-oracle-cloud-infrastructure/

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 11:15:38 am
content: Quote from: newbrain on June 28, 2023, 09:36:17 amUsed to have same preference as yours, but since YT started to allow faster playback speed, a video might be less time consuming than reading. It allows one to play it sideways with other work. Most videos don't need eyes on screen, and my default playback for YouTube is x2 speed anyways (sometimes at 3x), so 3 minutes for this video, while doing something else in parallel. Reading might take longer and requires eyes on text single task.Not arguing against personal preferences, only trying to encourage the use of high speed playback. At first I've tried 1.25, then after a while I've start using x1.5, now x2 or x2.5 speed seems natural and effortless to follow. You'll be surprised how fast the brain adapts to higher playback rates. Sometimes, the Firefox plugin 'Enhancer for Youtube' fails, and the speed switches back from x2/x3 to x1, making it all look and sound like a slow motion.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 06:25:26 pm
content: It will be interesting to see how FSF will react.You might remember that Red Hat pulled out from FSF because FSF reinstalled RMS, i.e. for social/woke reasons; RMS wasn't DEI enough.If RedHat's theory of their contracts overriding GPL is correct, what would stop anyone from doing the same with a shrink-wrapped EULA?The A at the end of that is Agreement, i.e. exactly the same kind of contract RedHat has with its customers.There are a lot of GPL developers who would go after Red Hat if it was anyone else, but being one of the largest employers, they don't dare, because it would impact very negatively on their employment opportunities in the future. It seems to me, this is exactly what Red Hat is counting on.If only a major kernel developer (as they retain the copyrights to the kernel code, unlike in many other projects where the copyright is transferred to the project) and a Red Hat customer would take them to court over this.. it would matter a lot to the FSF/legal side of things._ _ _ _To repeat: There is nothing wrong in only providing the sources to your paying customers. However, the GPL 2 explicitly states:Quoteand GPL 3:QuoteSo, the issue with Red Hat's behaviour is not that it only provides the sources to its own customers, but the fact that it tries to add additional restrictions on top of those customers using a separate contract. GPL licenses as quoted above forbid this, and if Red Hat gets a free pass, so will everyone else, and destroy the intent and purpose GPL was drafted for. What right does Red Hat have to violate the upstream GPL license, exploiting others for their own business gain?Nobody owns Red Hat a cent, especially not just to support a particular business model. If they can't hack it, it's their own fault, and not up to the Free Software communities to carry the burden of ensuring Red Hat makes a profit.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2023, 07:51:51 pm
content: Yes, this event has made some noise.First, I'll say that knowing IBM is behind Red Hat, this shouldn't come as a surprise. At all.As a general point, large corporations having their business revolve around open-source software is always going to be a problem at some point or another. My humble opinion, feel free to disagree.But what is happening here is completely "logical" and expected, even if it stinks.From what I got, the simple reason they are doing this is that a couple Linux distros that were piggybacking on RHEL were starting to take a sizable chunk of their market share.I'm really wondering what a commercial company is supposed to be doing in that kind of case, which is extremely frequent with open-source software. This is a genuine question. I just don't know how you can get your market back when you face this, while the very concept of open-source allows exactly that.That's a genuine question. I personally still haven't figured how you can make a long-term, profitable business *strictly* out of open-source software, unless you are a fundation, not a for-profit business, and you rely on donations (which has other implications in terms of your relative freedom.)Is Red Hat violating the GPL? I'm not expert at all in this kind of licensing questions, so I'll let experts debate it, and if it turns out they are, they'll have to back down anyway.But does that stink? Sure. Is it Red Hat's fault if they're not able to be profitable with open-source sofware? Absolutely. Does that warrant twisting open-source licenses in ways more favorable to them? Sure not.My little musing above though still holds. I don't know how possible it is to make a profitable business out of open-source software only, in the long run.Now as a small advice, stay away from corporate-"owned" Linux distros if you can.

author: beanflying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 29, 2023, 01:56:34 am
content: There is a fair chunk of the Hair on Fire crowd that is more upset that anyone dares to monetize notionally open source anything (software or hardware for that matter) for profit. This is of course complete bunkem and should be removed from any discussion anywhere.Further to that my memory was that Redhat was always a paid version of Linux from the initial release and only later changed. I am not even sure if the Source code back then was open or closed?1998QuoteIf you stick the corporate hat on just for a bit one of the only things in this case you have to sell is your IP and if other entities are using that IP to develop a rival widget to sell (or give away) against you then you can see why you would want put 'some' or totally restrict that from taking place in the future. This however is completely irrelevant to the discussion of Open Source vs Closed (fully or partly) but it is almost certainly 100% the reason for it.So the only thing to debate frankly is what was the original source code for REHL developed from and was it theirs to change the licensing of it in its entirety or maybe just on the parts they developed themselves as they would be really pushing poo uphill to close off the input of others in this change. If you initially owned controlled and developed the IP then the answer is clear you can do what you like with that licence.Has anyone tried to look at what is actually theirs and what they have developed over the last few decades?EDIT Ran across this and it is worth a read.https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes

author: beanflying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2023, 06:03:34 am
content: Hope you have big bags of PopcornNot a surprise Oraclehttps://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/joins a few others in trying to 'fork' over Red Hat and in particular REHL.

author: Veteran68
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2023, 03:30:33 pm
content: Quote from: beanflying on June 29, 2023, 01:56:34 amNope. I was a RH fan/user going back to the early 90's. I still have a boxed copy of RH v3 on floppy disks. Before that I installed RH by downloading from their FTP site (actually doing an FTP install, where you downloaded a small bootstrap installer that then pulled all the packages from FTP). Initially there was no such thing as a Red Hat "Enterprise" version -- the boxed version was just a convenience offering that included some minimal installation support, and was their first foray into monetizing the platform. I started buying those boxed copies not because I needed them, but to expressly support their efforts. Well that and FTP bandwidth at the time was minimal, LOL. I think they were like $50-$80 for a boxed copy, so not a big investment.Years later they commercialized the Enterprise version that included hardening and added management features not included in the upstream free codebase, along with support contracts. Some years later they formally split RHEL from upstream by rebranding upstream as Fedora. The GPL required they still make upstream sources available, which allowed distributions like CentOS to essentially be a clone of RHEL, but it had to be stripped of all RH branding, logos, and added features.Soapbox time...The company I work for (been here since March 1994) became a commercial RHEL customer in the late 90's or early 00's, and we were very happy with the enterprise support we received. For years I managed our corporate relationship with RH and was their biggest evangelist here. I was largely responsible for not only expanding the use of RHEL over Windows servers, but also bringing in additional RH products (OpenShift, JBoss EAP, RH SSO, Data Virtualization, etc.). We were very happy with their pricing and terms for many years, and they were my provider of choice when we had a need -- my default position when a business need was articulated was "can RH provide this?" I attended many Red Hat Summit conferences in Boston, and was the conference I most looked forward to. We were spending well over $1M/year with Red Hat for years, which is nothing compared with, say, IBM spend, but was a lot for the time for what amounted to a support contract around open-source software.Speaking of IBM, our company had long been an IBM customer and (unlike RH at the time) we had a very strained relationship with them. We were a large IBM mainframe shop (and still are, but are actively migrating off of it), and they knew they had us bent over a barrel with few if any options, so they constantly bullied us on pricing as we were essentially a captive customer. Once they surprise audited us and "fined" us over $300K for an admittedly poorly managed WebSphere deployment where we over-deployed (IBM had no licensing mechanism in place, so if you didn't account carefully, it was too easy to deploy more than you were paying for). No friendly conversation to "true up" going forward, which is something other vendors commonly do in this situation. It was very much a threat to "pay up or go to court" situation. Not to mention the horrible code and software quality of many of the off-mainframe software (WebSphere, DB2, various vertical business apps). So we generally despised IBM. We have a similar hate-hate relationship with Oracle, I'll add. Red Hat was always a pleasant supplier to work with, by comparison to those two.Then about 6-12 months prior to the IBM acquisition of RH being announced, we started noticing a decline in RH's support quality, code quality (lots of bugs and performance issues, that RH wasn't much help with), and prices started dramatically going up. The final straw was a nearly 2x increase in our 3-year subscription renewal, just to maintain what we had. No joke: Late one week (Thursday or Friday) I was on the phone venting with our RH "customer advocate" rep responsible for our account, and I mentioned to her that RH was starting to look and smell a LOT like IBM. That weekend, a couple of days later, the IBM acquisition was announced. She called me the following week asking me if I had insider information, because the rank-and-file RH employees had no knowledge until it was announced.They promised that they would continue to be run as an independent company and that IBM would not be changing their business model and practices. Yeah, sure. We'd already seen the "IBM-ization" for months leading up to it. If IBM was not directly influencing their practices, RH was positioning themselves as an attractive acquisition for a company like IBM by aligning themselves with those practices.We drastically reduced our RH footprint as a result, renewing only the necessary RHEL support subscriptions and moving away from all the other RH software I mentioned. We're actively looking to replace RHEL with something like Ubuntu Enterprise to get them out completely. I've now gone from being their biggest evangelist to their biggest detractor, because I feel they've betrayed their open source roots and their long-term loyal enterprise customers.All that to say, this latest news just confirms my sentiment towards them.

author: JohanH
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2023, 05:19:11 pm
content: Redhat source code is still freely available. Most of it is open source and every package can be tracked down and the source code downloaded without paying anything. This might require a free subscription so that you can find the exact package from their portal. For CentOS Stream and Fedora, the repositories are available on the web without subscription.What you don't get without a free or paid subscription is direct access to their RHEL repositories. But this has always been the case. What has changed now is that you can't download everything 1:1 and create your own distro _easily_ from it, making it an exact copy of RHEL. I.e. cloning it automatically and setting up almost identical mirrors. Well, you could, but it would be against their EULA (or whatever it's called). So say goodby to build systems that automatically rebuilds RHEL into a clone. However, if you carefully tracked down everything, you might be able to end up with a similar system. This looks like what Alma Linux and some other are likely pursuing.I don't see anything really wrong here. What they essentially restrict is access to their online OS repositories for clone distributions, not to individual open source software packages.As an individual, you can still get their free developer subscription and install RHEL and get all updates. Or use CentOS Stream. Or Fedora. And do whatever with the source.It could turn out in a bad way for end users in the long run, though, I don't dispute that. We are just so spoiled that everything with a free license is freely available on the Internet.Also note that a diminishing part of software is distributed under the GPL license. If Redhat were really evil, they could treat BSD/Apache/MIT/whatever licensed software differently and distribute that source code differently. Or not distribute the source at all.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2023, 06:48:14 pm
content: Quote from: JohanH on July 19, 2023, 05:19:11 pmWhat about the patches they apply to upstream GPL sources?As far as I understand, their service agreement with their clients that forbids them from distributing the sources, is an additional restriction on top of GPL, which the GPL explicitly forbids. Red Hat owns the copyrights to only very few projects/components. For example, the copyrights to the Linux kernel are owned by the individual contributors, and not any single entity. Red Hat also tends to apply custom patches to their kernels, which makes the kernel a hot point in all this mess.I suppose Red Hat is counting on having had employed so many kernel developers, that the rest don't want to raise a ruckus about that (in the name of "professionalism" and not alienating past/current/possible future cow-orkers); and that if anyone were to raise a ruckus, Red Hat can lean on the kernel developers they have employed and are currently employing to apply social pressure on that developer. We've already seen this (social pressure used to override technical details) in the Debian init debacle.Just in case you understand where I am coming from: It is perfectly okay for Red Hat to charge for their distribution. What I don't like, is theprecendentthey create with respect to preventing the redistribution of the sources using their client agreement. What if appliance vendors start doing the same? Their shrinkwrap licenses could state for example that if you redistribute the GPL sources to the appliance the customer consents to the vendor bricking all their devices. The law regarding copyright protection is very sensitive, and Red Hat's behaviour here sets a dangerous precedent, in my opinion –– and I base my opinion on observing the legal wranglings around GPL for more than a quarter century.

author: Veteran68
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2023, 06:59:32 pm
content: And to be clear, if it wasn't obvious from my rant above, I have ZERO issue with Red Hat's business model of charging subscriptions for their services. As I said, I happily gave them millions of dollars of commercial business for years.It's their recent business practices that I take exception with.

author: Bryn
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2023, 07:23:33 pm
content: Putting the source code over a paywall sounds like one great contradiction to me... not going to work, and never will. Hang your head in shame, Red Hat

author: rsjsouza
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 19, 2023, 09:01:24 pm
content: Pretty bad move from RH. I wonder if someone would take them to court similarly to that old FSF vs. Cisco (Linksys) lawsuit 15 years ago...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc._v._Cisco_Systems,_Inc.