While I disagree with Red Hat’s decision to hinder source access, this move from Rocky (a commercial company!) seems even more disingenuous, imho.
While I disagree with Red Hat’s decision to hinder source access, this move from Rocky (a commercial company!) seems even more disingenuous, imho.
I don’t think Red Hat is violating GPL. For sure it’s not violating the legal terms of it (I’m fairly certain the army of lawyers RH and IBM have at their beck and call made sure of that) and I don’t think it’s violating it’s spirit (at least not yet) – they are still contributing any changes and their customers still get access to the source code. And (for now!) it doesn’t even seem they are making it super difficult to do so either. The way I see it, RH wants to be the only game in town providing service contracts for their own product which is fair game, imho. The problem with Rocky is that they also stand to make money out of the same source code which is the disingenuous part, in my opinion.
I honestly don’t know why Rocky made this announcement, even if their intentions are noble, they do come out as the bad guys in all this mess. They could have simply put out some generic announcement that “we are working towards a legal way” and kept doing what they are doing.
And to be clear: I believe the true people that stand to lose in this are the users and the community. I’ve been a user of CentOS (the old style, not this new breed of RHEL beta) for a long time and even an occasional Rocky user in recent times, but that will have to change.
They are absolutely violating the spirit of the GPL. Telling your customers that you will not keep them as customers if they exercise their rights under the GPL is as clear a spiritual violation as it gets. And whether they are violating the letter of the law is an unresolved question.
The problem is that the software is not “their product.” Free Software is a collective endeavor that RedHat contributes to. It is not a product that belongs to them. The product is the support, and RedHat, by virtue of the GPL and the nature of Free Software, cannot stake an exclusive claim to the support.
I really can’t comment on the legality aspect, but again, I would assume they asked real law experts before the move. On the morality of it, I can put my 2 cents forward. The way I understand it, companies buy Red Hat for the support, testing and the guarantee that what they buy is stable. And I think that’s the product, not the source code. In simpler terms, RH is not selling Apache (for example), they are selling this specific version of Apache, compiled in this specific way, running on this specific version of the kernel etc etc. If someone else comes and sells the exact same thing, but without putting the work towards testing, bugfixing, backporting and whatever else RH does is what we call in the industry a “dick move” :) In the end, why does Oracle/Rocky/Alma want to sell the same exact thing when they could build their own? I think it’s because it’s extremely expensive to do all that and they just want to do the easy part which is providing support.
And as I was saying in a reply towards someone else: I think all of this is targeting Oracle, not some startup with no customers. But Oracle knows when to shut up, we didn’t hear a pip from them in all of this.
Yeah I agree, the community will be the ones who suffer from this.
If only Red Had didn’t kill CentOS, they won’t have this problem now. But noooo. Their IBM overlord demand more revenue, so they killed CentOS to force their users to buy RHEL licenses which increase their short term profits. By killing CentOS, they created a vacuum that’s now filled by Rocky, Alma and Oracle Linux. Red Hat see them as eating their lunch, so they double down on making stupid decision again.
I’m sure their decision to make accessing RHEL source code harder will backfire again within a few years and Red Had will make an even dumber move again.