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RedHat found a way to get around the GPLv2 license intention with contract law
(opencoreventures.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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The GPL only cares about ensuring the four freedoms are maintained for binaries and their related sources. It has nothing to say about other services you may or may not be asked to pay for. Indeed as you say the GPL allows for reasonable costs to supply source code. We have gotten used to this being ubiquitous and "free as in beer" but it's not really. All this distribution costs someone somewhere money to do.
The four freedoms may say you can run the program for any purpose without restriction but there are definitely other laws that would have a say if you did certain things with those programs.
@stsquad @EmbeddedEntropy
> We have gotten used to this being ubiquitous and “free as in beer” but it’s not really.
Any big company which cannot bear the costs of publishing code to github can just calculate how much it would have costed them, then send the code to me and I'll upload it to github for them and only ask for half of the price. Seriously, I'll halve your "cost". Because it is actually free and they are just bullshitting.
Is this not the same kind of argument companies make against piracy? I think it's not so much a pricing problem than it is a service problem. In the same way that people rely on Steam rather than pirating every single game on the market, it's the services that are offered rather than the price that has to be paid.
Say you go ahead and do this - what guarantees will you make with that price? Guarantees like priority support and timely package updates cost money, which doesn't sound viable unless the big company is setting absurdly high prices, in which case, that just sounds like competition.
I'd rather they didn't have to waste their valuable engineer time supporting the small niche case of some making certain magic binaries a little easier to hack on. Their time can be much better spent working on the upstream project wherever it might be hosted. As long as the license is respected Red Hat can distribute as they want. Indeed you could argue that CentOS stream provides the "preferred form" of code access required for building Red Hat like distros.
This is a storm in a teacup when we have bigger oceans to boil.
No, the GPL goes beyond that. It not only ensures those four freedoms, but also ensures the freedom to exercise them without restriction. That's what the language in section 6 is meant to protect. If RH only limited potential access to future releases of binaries, I see that as fine and not a restriction. But RH is going well beyond that by terminating existing contracts; accounts; technical, web, and support access; and not refunding monies paid in advance for those services. (Theoretically, since they haven't done it to anyone yet that I'm aware of.) If legally those actions are not deemed a "restriction", then I'd agree with you.