To say that restrictions also include the consequences of doing some thing (e.g. you receive no further binaries) implies to me that the definition would be completely up to the user.

I would say it's up to a court, not a user, to decide whether or not in the context contract law if those "consequences" are also "restrictions".

Contract law is all about defining actions and the consequences of what happens when those actions are taken or not taken. What's the point of having a granted right if I can't exercise it without a significant, immediate, and direct penalty imposed by the grantor? I would say that's no longer a right.

Section 6 is not just about a grantor taking away any of the four rights, but also about stopping the grantor imposing any further restrictions on the exercise of those rights granted by the GPL. Otherwise, if section 6 was just to protect those four rights by themselves, why wouldn't it just simply say, "The rights granted herein to the recipients, all or in part, may not be revoked under any conditions by the licensor."?

If the language of section 6 were the above alternative, I'd certainly be taking your position. But RH isn't revoking those rights, they are attempting to restrict the exercise of them using penalties, what I believe section 6 is directly trying to prevent. As I mentioned elsewhere, those penalties go way beyond just disabling access to potential future versions of software packages and their matching source. (If that were just the case, I'd also be inclined to agree with your position that losing potential future access by itself would arguably not be a restriction.)

This seems rife with ambiguouity, which from my understanding would not work well in court. In contrast, “ability to copy/distribute/modify this snapshot of code regardless of what happens afterwards” remains a guarantee.

I would say its ambiguous to us (without legal training), but I'd bet the language used in the GPL license is pretty clear to a contract lawyer and would have some legal precedence as well. Lawyers tend to avoid using words and phrases without established precedence behind them.

Back in 1990-1991, I was working for a company that was unhappy shipping its commercial software compiled with GCC under the language of the GPLv1. I was on the team (engineering side) that worked with RMS and his legal team to craft the GPLv2 and LGPL as replacements for the GPLv1 that eventually made everyone involved happy. I wasn't directly involved, but was on the periphery and got to see a lot of the proposed language and reasoning behind it being raised and discussed on both sides. Unfortunately, I don't remember any of it after all this time. But I do remember just how much effort went into practically every word that was (and was not) in that license. That experience though led me to being a GPL supporter for the last 30 years.

I don’t see any loopholes that would violate the four freedoms. At no point would you be unable to copy, distribute, or modify code for the binaries that you have. [...] I thought you’d still have access to the source for the binaries on your box, just that you couldn’t ask for the source of newer binaries since they would have already stopped supplying those. I could also be misunderstanding how Red Hat’s systems work.

Yes, that's a problem. Without your now deleted account, you would lose access the matching source. With RH systems, you have to have a valid, authorized, and logged-in RH account to access the source for a given installed binary package.

As mentioned elsewhere, RH could plug this problem by offering to allow you to request the source for those packages outside of the normal channels such as a charged service for mailing you a DVD or USB stick. But as far as I know, they have not offered this service, hence a GPL violation with their current approach of cancelling your account.

I don’t see any loopholes that would violate the four freedoms. At no point would you be unable to copy, distribute, or modify code for the binaries that you have.

It's not just the four freedoms the GPL protects, but the exercise of them. Maybe there's a chance I've convinced you a little more of the position I have. :) At least I hope you more clearly see it.

Thanks, I appreciate your insights. Was surprised that it’s not new from Red Hat.

And for yours as well.

IBM deserves a lot of blame for a lot of things, but on this one issue, they don't.