I believe the GPL asks you never have to make agreement to access GPL
code.
Correct. Per the GPL if you have the binary you have a legal right to the code. Also the GPL does contain clauses that stipulate that outside agreements cannot excuse anyone from the conditions of the license, see the No Surrender of Others' Freedom section.
Also keep in mind that you can download the RHEL ISOs for free without a dev license from this page: https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download You can't update the packages, but you can install that version of RHEL on your computer and use it. So anyone grabbing that ISO has legal right to the source code for the base system.
On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 4:35 PM Philip Wyett philip.wyett@kathenas.org wrote:
On Wed, 2023-06-21 at 16:23 -0400, JT wrote:
Red Hat doesn't need to mention it. It's a legal requirement of the
GPL... anyone using the
binaries has legal right to the source code.
As for Red Hat cancelling users accounts who pull the source build
binaries and share it...
that'd probably land them in a lawsuit, because as long as that person
who originally downloaded
the code has the binaries... they are legally entitled to the source for
them for as long as they
have the binaries.
Furthermore, anyone who shares a binary they build from RH sources...
has a legal requirement to
share the source onto the next person.
These are precisely the type of issues with the MIT/BSD license that
Stallman wanted to address
with the GPL.
Red Hat could terminate the dev license... and put RHEL entirely behind
a paywall, but they have
not stated that they are doing so. And I would imagine that they would
get a ton of backlash if
they did considering that was how they addressed the reaction the
CentOS/CentOS Stream change.
But even if they did that, they still have to provide source to anyone
with the binaries. So all
it would take is one person buying a license, and then releasing the
code.
Even if Red Hat banned that account, there would just be another account
to do the same thing
again. Red Hat would have to play whack-a-mole to try to stop people
from doing that constantly.
Whack-a-mole is not what we want to play and we are aware of MIT and GPL licenses. What the community needs is a free source of entry. I believe the GPL asks you never have to make agreement to access GPL code. However Red Hat have not defined what a customer and partner is, but this requires having a Red Hat account which requires agreeing to terms etc. to access the srpms.
Regards
Phil
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