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Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams | The Register (www.theregister.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.