"If it's permissible, it's really close to the line," he said, adding: "I don't think we should give it a pass." He said it's unclear whether IBM's business model is compatible with the GPL. Kuhn told The Register that doesn't quite capture his position. "Bradley should allow this to get to a court," he said. Perens said that Kuhn believes IBM is within its rights to pursue this business model but opined that he does not agree. "This is why we call the business model: 'if you exercise your rights under the GPL, your money is no good here.' Whether or not this RHEL business model complies with the GPL is a matter of intense debate, and opinions differ, but no one (except Red Hat) believes that this business model is in the spirit of the GPL and FOSS." If you exercise your rights under the GPL, your money is no good here When they audit their customers, if IBM's Red Hat finds even one extra (legitimate!) copy you made of GPL'd software, they revoke your RHEL services permanently. "For example, the RHEL contracts require their customers to consent to BSA-style audits. "Unfortunately, the war of words between these two mostly proprietary software companies (IBM and Oracle) simply distracts from the central areas of concern with the RHEL business model," he continued. "While failure to provide CCS to the entire public does make someone a bad FOSS citizen, it doesn't (by itself) mean a GPL violation has occurred," said Kuhn. "Oracle implies that the GPL requires that all source code be made available to the public," he said, asserting that IBM and Red Hat are correct when they claim they only have to provide complete corresponding source code (CCS) to those who receive a binary distribution or who request the full source in conjunction with an offer for source code from a distributor. Kuhn also challenged Oracle's interpretation of the GPL, saying it implies the GPLv2 requires making binaries and source freely available to everyone. Europe's largest city council runs parallel systems to cover Oracle rollout messīradley Kuhn, a policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, has written at length on the RHEL transition and told The Register that what looks like a battle for enterprise customers may hurt the open source community.Red Hat releases RHEL 9.2 to customers, with buffet of rebuilds for the rest of us.Red Hat to stop packaging LibreOffice for RHEL.Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams.I don't think that we as developers should go on feeding them without substantial license changes." Large companies game the paradigm and exploit the community. That is the unfortunate reality of commercial open source today. "If you have RHEL, you sign a contract that you won't give the source code to anyone else," he said, "not even the people who wrote the program and deserve to find out about bugs and fixes. IBM and Red Hat, he opined, take advantage of this in a way that is perhaps unfair to the community of code contributors who don't work for IBM. Because it was invented in the days of magnetic tape for data, it requires only that source code be given to the people who receive the binary version of the program." "Were it written today, it would require that they be shared publicly online. "The GPL requires that changes be shared as source code," Perens said. On the other hand, IBM subscription agreements specify that you’re in breach if you use those subscription services to exercise your GPLv2 rights." Changes in techīruce Perens, one of the founders of the open source movement, told The Register in an email that IBM, like Red Hat before it, is gaming the GPL in his opinion. We do not have subscription agreements that interfere with a subscriber’s rights to redistribute Oracle Linux. "Oracle has always made Oracle Linux binaries and source freely available to all. "While Oracle and IBM have compatible Linux distributions, we have very different ideas about our responsibilities as open source stewards and about operating under the GPLv2," the Oracle pair said, taking the opportunity to encourage code contributions to Oracle Linux and to tease about potential job opportunities.
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