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.
you still have the binaries (and are allowed to, they’re GPL)
you want the source code again… but can’t. Account is closed.
Now you’re in a situation where you’re entitled to receive the source code, but can’t because they won’t let you.
If this will ever go to court, I suspect RedHat will pursue a “corner case” solution. A canceled account will probably have access to the source code from RedHat *up to that very cancel-date" and you’ll not get a new binary (from them). So it should be mostly legal for them to do so.
However, as long as no trademark of RedHat is violated, distributing individual RHEL binaries (not the full images, they contain trademarked assets) should be fine. So you could receive a binary through that route and be entitled to the source code for it, starting the whole process over again.
Scenario:
Now you’re in a situation where you’re entitled to receive the source code, but can’t because they won’t let you.
If this will ever go to court, I suspect RedHat will pursue a “corner case” solution. A canceled account will probably have access to the source code from RedHat *up to that very cancel-date" and you’ll not get a new binary (from them). So it should be mostly legal for them to do so.
However, as long as no trademark of RedHat is violated, distributing individual RHEL binaries (not the full images, they contain trademarked assets) should be fine. So you could receive a binary through that route and be entitled to the source code for it, starting the whole process over again.