Red Hat just erected a paywall in front of the source code to their Linux distribution.Are they burning bridges to the wider open source ecosystem?Referenced...
An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.
If it was just that they were repackaging source code and putting it behind a paywall, then there would be no problem at all.
The problem is, as I understand it, that they are selling modified GPL code without giving people access to it. That’s against the GPL license. Out of all people, Red Hat should be aware of what the GPL states.
So I think it’s pretty fair to accused Red Hat of being intentionally evil here. If it was just a mistake, then I’d say it’s a very very dumb mistake. Either way, if these are the kind of people who run Red Hat now, things don’t look good.
If it was just that they were repackaging source code and putting it behind a paywall, then there would be no problem at all.
The problem is, as I understand it, that they are selling modified GPL code without giving people access to it. That’s against the GPL license. Out of all people, Red Hat should be aware of what the GPL states.
So I think it’s pretty fair to accused Red Hat of being intentionally evil here. If it was just a mistake, then I’d say it’s a very very dumb mistake. Either way, if these are the kind of people who run Red Hat now, things don’t look good.
The access is given as per the GPL, it doesn’t have to be publicly available.