A superficially modest blog post from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can’t publish it.
Accidentally deleted my last comment… but a summary of what I had said, I don’t think it’s clickbait. This is an inflection point for the entire space and I actually considered changing the title because I didn’t think it properly expressed just how damaging it is. It restricts people receiving RHEL source, compromising existing derivatives and essentially closing off the possibility of any more. RHEL is an extremely influential distro, others will follow its lead. Also, it’s a copy and paste of the original title.
If you think anything I’ve said here is incorrect or you have a different perspective, I’m totally open for discourse. Just don’t go around leaving negative comments without explaining yourself - I was hoping this community would be better than Reddit too.
(Lemmy REALLY needs a confirmation box for that. Not the first time lol)
Frankly, I’m more concerned about the precedent this sets for the GPL.
If Red Hat can do this, then there’s nothing (legally) preventing every other megacorp from ending public contributions to Linux and other GPL projects, forking them, and releasing them under restrictive contractual terms.
Granted, not everyone would take their code private. Microsoft and Apple make some contributions to BSD/MIT/etc. licensed software even though they are not required to. However, I think we’d miss out on quite a lot of FOSS development.