That glosses over RedHat's strong arm sales tactics of the community, and rules-lawyering the GPL. Redistributing "their" source, as allowed by the GPL, is liable for your support license to not get renewed. And where's the Red Hat kernel source in a digestible format? I haven't followed recently, but they were at one point distributing their diffs to the mainline kernel as a single giant patch file and arguing that it was okay. It may abide by the letter of the GPL, but it's against the spirit of interoperability.
RedHat's the first billion dollar Linux company, but first and foremost it's a business. Their sales people are aggressive and their lawyer's hungry. Support contracts don't exactly fly off the shelves, especially when there's a huge community of experts.
How many people do you know that have given money to Canonical for Ubuntu?
Also, RedHat stopped providing detail changelogs and started doing just one bug diff dump after Oracle started hurting their business -- where Oracle's work at the time was basically repackaging RedHat's work and doing "sed s/RedHat Enterprise Linux/Oracle Unbreakable Linux". RedHat did what it felt needed to fend that off.
Up until that time, they were publishing their internal repositories.
While I agree with the criticism of Redhat, Oracle's behavior was shitty. I'll have remember this next time I land on a "Support Contract Only" Redhat knowledge base page. Oracle is just a bully.
> ...rules-lawyering the GPL. Redistributing "their" source, as allowed by the GPL, is liable for your support license to not get renewed.
There isn't anything wrong with that at all. If someone is undermining RedHat's business model it is reasonable for RedHat not to support them.
The spirit of the GPL is the source code should be available and the user can do what they like with it. RedHat makes the source code available and the user can do whatever they like with it. No principle says RedHat has to like what people do with their GPL-ed code. Quite the reverse is expected, in fact.
The spirit of the GPL is to make source code available. Why? So that anyone can maintain the software. Thus there's an expectation (however naive) that the code is in a usable format because that's kind of the point of having the source. RedHat, however, provides the source in an obtuse format, a format that isn't even how it's used it internally. That is to say, they go above and beyond, in order to make their source harder to use. I'd say that pretty directly violates the spirit, if not the letter of the GPL.
The other part is that the GPL explicitly grants customers the right to redistribute the changes. That's pretty wild. Buying a DVD copy of Avengers doesn't give me the right to setup Avengersflix.com and sell subscriptions. GPL software does. RedHat then turns around and says if you actually do that, then fuck you (paraphrased a bit). They are entirely within their rights to do that, but if you're telling me the spirit of the GPL gives me a right that I'm not actually supposed to exercise, then we'll just have to disagree. (Un)forunately for me, the legal system looks at the letter of the GPL rather than the spirit, so what Redhat's doing is legal.
Why does the GPL explicitly grant that permission if it isn't meant to be exercised? Why did RedHat choose the GPL?
They didn't, is the answer. It chose them. The two fundamental pieces, GNU libc and the Linux kernel, are LGPL and GPLv2 licensed, respectively, along with many other packages, and relicensing them is not something RedHat has the rights to do.
Hence, RedHat's strong-arm tactics to force people into buying expensive support contracts.
There's nothing legally wrong with what they're doing but it's still a dick move by RedHat. Sure, RedHat's dick move is in response to Oracle's dick move, but two wrongs don't make a right. They do make a billion dollar business though.
There are other more opinionated licenses that RedHat could adopt for new software that they do own the copyright to. For the conscientious objector software developer, there's the idea of the Non-Military Open Source License which says the military is not allowed to use the software. There's the AGPL, which is a further left license that says if you use my website, I owe you the source, and all modifications to it. Hell, RedHat can afford the lawyers to write their own license that says companies started by Larry Ellison aren't allowed access to the source.
I don't know the support contract details from RedHat, but they are one very large contributor to the kernel and other parts of the eco system as they employ lots of the contributors. Also, their source is freely available, they call it CentOS.
RedHat's the first billion dollar Linux company, but first and foremost it's a business. Their sales people are aggressive and their lawyer's hungry. Support contracts don't exactly fly off the shelves, especially when there's a huge community of experts.
How many people do you know that have given money to Canonical for Ubuntu?