I highly doubt this would affect Fedora. Thankfully, it's community driven and self-goverened so Red Hat execs can't go and tell them what to do. (Though I don't know how many ties the Fedora council had to Red Hat)
The concern is that Red Hat terminates your account if you redistribute the source to another party. This feels like an additional restriction placed on the source code, which if it is, would indeed violate the GPL.
I haven't seen this in person so I can only speculate, but I bet they'll only provide the sources as a tarball or something instead of a git repo, which will make it a PITA for anyone do actually do anything useful with it. I mean, you could potentially still build a full distro from it, but you wouldn't be able to feasibly maintain it without the ability to do a sync and merge from upstream. So this way, Red Hat achieves their goal of being able to kill any spinoff distro, whilst still remaining compliant with the GPL.
It’s not a “they will.” Red Hat customers are able to download source rpms from the repository or the site, this has been the case for a very long time. It is possible to clone / sync the repository, this is how airgapped networks can still host their own.
IBM: We poured money and resources into Linux before 99% of the business world had even heard of it. We helped make it great. Why shouldn't we require a return on that investment?
PLEASE UNDERSTAND, I think IBM/RH is bone-headed as heck and are now inexcusable violators of the GPL, and other licenses.
I knew they were going to *break* RH and make it something abominable.
But they *were* there at the very beginning of the 2000s, promoting Linux heavily. (Not altruistically, of course)
This is not a violation of the GPL. They are allowed to charge for access to the source. If you provide binaries/images to a customer, you also must provide source. However, anyone who doesn't pay isn't entitled to it.
It's ultimately because of capital. Capital controls resource allocation, so any project that requires resources will have to align with capital interests
I don't know about that. IBM is traditionally stupid, yeah, but they wanted Red Hat for a reason. The CentOS debacle altogether was Red Hat, not IBM, and I don't think they are doing too much day to day operational mandates for stuff like this. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing. I know it's easy to blame IBM, but I don't think it's that simple.
They were dying and they needed a cash cow to milk. The only way that was gonna work is if they didn't kick the cow and spoil that milk like they've kicked every cow before it. And they can't stop, so they're just kicking away.
. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.
It's a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.
But this new one is QUITE the departure. It's not 'red hat' stupid but a little further on the spectrum.
Not surprised. A for-profit corporation wanting more money. Especially as we enroach further into late stage capitalism where corporations struggle to find more territory to profiteer from and squeeze more profit out of us.
The era of free services being profitable is ending rapidly, and we see this across many areas in the world.