On one side, you have Red Hat, a long time champion of open source software, that has poured billions of dollars into open source development, and which has 1000s of employees who not only on ‘company’ time but in their own time manage, develop, contribute, and create open source code. They have funded countless successful and unsuccessful projects that we all use.

As far as I’m concerned, this is simply not relevant to the issue at hand. Yes, Red Hat has made many, many contributions to open source over the years. That is beyond question, and I thank them for it. It does nothing to excuse their current behavior though. All of those contributions were freely made under the GPL. Red Hat cannot retroactively say “well, we’ve made enough contributions that we think these shouldn’t be free any more, please pay us money.” Under the GPL there is literally no threshold where that is allowed.

Red Hat knows this of course, so instead they’re putting the source behind a click-through license agreement. In order to access their source trees you now have to agree to their license, which states that you’re not allowed to redistribute what you’ve been given. Of course the GPL also has language specifically designed to prevent such attempts. There’s a “further restrictions” clause that allows those receiving GPL source code to remove any further restrictions that weren’t in the GPL originally. That would allow Red Hat’s customer to legally redistribute that source code, as was always intended under the GPL.

But Red Hat lawyers know this too! They know that their customers have the legal right to strip off the extra restrictions imposed by that click-through license wrapper. So how then do they enforce this restriction? With threats and coercion. “Forgo your GPL rights, or we’ll stop supporting the software we sold you / deny you any further access.” What amount of past open source contributions make it OK for Red Hat to threaten their customers in an effort to prevent them from exercising their rights under the GPL? I say there is no amount of past contribution that makes Red Hat’s current behavior acceptable, just like there’s no amount of past contribution that would make it OK for them to close the source entirely.

Here’s the interesting part for me. As far as I can see, none of the users are jumping to the Rebuilder’s defence of Red Hat’s accusation that the Rebuilders provide nothing back to the community.

I’ll be happy to do so. At least some of the users of downstream distros are using them so they can validate the compatibility of their code with RHEL, without having to subject themselves to Red Hat’s licensing terms. Jeff Geerling is one such example. They are (or in some case were) providing direct value to Red Hat’s customer, and thus indirect value to Red Hat themselves, by validating that their own contributions would work in RHEL. Red Hat’s choices make their efforts harder, and call into question whether FOSS contributors should continue to make efforts that indirectly benefit Red Hat.

Personally, the company I work for has been using CentOS for many years because Red Hat wanted to place onerous licensing restrictions on any use of RHEL in the cloud, which is where most of our testing is done. To be clear, my company doesn’t use RHEL internally on its own production systems, nor do we redistribute it in the products we sell. The only reason we care about testing against RHEL is because many of our customers use RHEL on their production systems. Our only motivation is to make sure that our products work correctly when they interoperate with RHEL systems at our customer sites. Are we “taking” from Red Hat by doing this? I say the opposite. Our customers benefit directly, and Red Hat benefits indirectly when such mutual customers can do more and better things with their RHEL systems.

And let me tell you, Red Hat has not been fun to work with. We’re a member of their partner network, we’re doing this testing so we can help our mutual customers do the things they want to do, and Red Hat has been a pain in our ass at many turns. Their awful account management makes it harder to onboard new employees and get them set up for testing on RHEL. Red Hat threw licensing curveballs at us like “oh btw cloud usage is no longer covered under the partner license, move all your testing on-prem in 30 days or pay us $texas, kthxbye!” (We scrambled and switched to CentOS in the cloud in record time instead.) They subject us to annoying, time-consuming audits. CentOS for testing is a breeze by comparison, with no need to worry about accounts or audits or subscriptions or entitlement usage.