Software Freedom Conservancy

A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model
SFC's Policy Fellow, Bradley M. Kuhn, has written a comprehensive analysis of the situation with the #RHEL (#RedHat Enterprise #Linux) business model, and how it relates to the software rights & freedoms promised in the #GPL agreements.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

#CentOS #RedHat #OpenSource #copyleft #FOSS
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A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

@conservancy It's seriously gross and very obviously not in the spirit of the license. I think it's extremely questionable whether it's permitted by the license at all and desperately hope they get chewed to shit in court over it.

@conservancy the fact that Rocky Linux exists tells me all I need to know.

Criticizing things doesn't always mean you loathe or hate the entirety of the thing, it means you see room for improvement.

A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

@conservancy As a non-computer person whenever I heard "Red Hat," I thought of the folkloric Red Cap--a malevolent and tyrannical creature.

After reading this article, I think maybe I wasn't so far off in making that connecting

A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

This article from @conservancy about / is a really good read, and worth your time, especially if you have any attachment to the old or @almalinux () or the in general.
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@tschenkel @conservancy How pragmatic are you? Will your needs fit within the 16 machine limit offered for free to devs by RedHat - and do you trust them not to change the rules mid-game again?

Otherwise you have the choice to hope Rocky or Alma manage to keep things together despite having their legs cut out from under them. The nuclear option is to look at other distributions like SUSE, which has a strong following in parts of Europe, or something from the Debian family.

@HellbentHobo @conservancy keeping private changes, or changes that you only distribute to those who get a copy of the binary is very much in the spirit of the and . What BlueHat is doing is using our basic rights against us.. they also control many projects indirectly.

A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

@conservancy we stopped all work on centos when redhat literally scratched it overnight only keeping centos 7 😵‍💫 seems we will go to @almalinux for the future for those wanting rpm packages

A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

@conservancy thank you very much for this.

@tschenkel @mikael @conservancy Yeah, OpenSUSE Leap checks most of the boxes. It does not, however, do SELinux out of the box, so there's some extra non-trivial setup for that. Same would also be true for Ubuntu that also ships AppArmor by default instead.

@tschenkel @mikael @conservancy I've started supporting Leap and for workloads in my dayjob as of a week or so ago in the wake of this and honestly, apart from s/dnf/zypper, most things work pretty much use same as RHEL + EPEL.