On Mon, Jun 26, 2023 at 07:29:23PM -0400, Colin McGregor via talk wrote:
Let's see if I understand this correctly, Red Hat has now put a whole lot of open source / GPL software behind a paywall, where you have to pay $$ for a subscription in order to access the source code. Then if anyone uses that subscription to produce an Red Hat style distribution (ie: Red Hat minus any support services) their subscription will be cancelled... Is the above what I am reading here? :
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enterprise-linux
If this is true then it confirms my decision to use Debian GNU/Linux as for all its' faults (and it does have several) Debian GNU/Linux just doesn't pull this sort of @#$% .
Red Hat charges for access to their software and support. If you get their software that way, they of course are required to let you have the source code. But then they do in fact tell you that if you share that source code (which you are of course permitted to do by the license), they are allowed to cancel your contract and decide to never do business with you again. Well I think they say they can cancel your contract for any reason they want, but that sharing the source code would very likely make them do so. So similar to what the grsecurity people were trying to do, but at IBM scale instead. Red Hat is far from the company it was 30 years ago. Yeah I am happy I switched to debian 25 years ago because Red Hat's quality was so poor at the time. Debian having a better designed packaging system was a bonus. -- Len Sorensen