I admit I know nothing about what programs RedHat has contributed to, or what their plans are. I am only familiar with the GPL in general (I use arch, btw). So I tried to have Bing introduce me to the situation. The conversation got weird and maybe manipulative by Bing.

Can you explain to me why Bing is right and I am wrong?

It sounds like a brazen GPL violation. And if RedHat is allowed to deny a core feature of the GPL, the ability to redistribute, it will completely destroy the ability of any author to specify any license other than MIT. Perhaps Microsoft has that goal and forced Bing to support it.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Bing Chat is wrong. RHEL customers are legally allowed to share the code. What Red Had can do, and that has nothing to do with the GPL, is to end the contract with the customer who shared the code, thereby according to the GPL the customer also no longer has any right to access the code. The GPL only applies to software distribution, not contracts outside copyright law.

    Edit: Red Hat is under no obligation to share non-copyleft code of which there is plenty in a Linux distribution but they do. Just look at Apple: Take plenty of FOSS code, give back only a fraction. It sucks but it’s legal. That’s also why Apple moved away from GPL software – can’t even bothered to ship BASH with macOS.

    • Drew Got No Clue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Yes. I just don’t know if it’s good to phrase it as “RHEL customers are legally allowed to share the code”, since as soon as they do it they won’t be allowed to be customers anymore lol (assuming Red Hat finds out)

    • apatters@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Whether RedHat is violating the GPL by cancelling the contracts of customers who exercise their rights under the GPL is an open question. There certainly is not a consensus on this in the open source community, the Software Freedom Conservancy seems to lean toward the view that RedHat’s new policy is in violation - https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

      However the only way to find out is for someone to challenge RedHat in court. IANAL but if you could demonstrate in a court that RedHat has actually had a pattern of behavior where they are canceling contracts whenever people exercised their rights under the software license, I think you might have a pretty good case. IBM for their part has good lawyers and is basically saying bring it on, this is business.