"It appears that the upstream kernel endeavor on Rocky Linux may be gated to their commercial customers as opposed to making all the assets freely available and just gating their commercial support."
@purpleidea@sageofredondo this goes beyond what Red Hat is doing. Everything that goes to RHEL ends up in CentOS Stream, they critised us for not making exact backport patches to existing RHEL streams available to public.
This kernel thing doesn't seem to be public at all.
@sesivany@sageofredondo I mean, we all know it will have to be public by GPL, eventually, so it doesn't at this outset look to be materially that different. I'm not advocating for this but maybe it's not that different from what a big "open source" company is doing?
@purpleidea@sageofredondo GPL doesn't dictate it has to be public. GPL says the source code has to be available to the users of the software. If you only provide the software to your customers, you can only provide source code to them, too.
Legally it's all fine. It's the hypocrisy I'm pointing to here.
@purpleidea@sesivany are you sure you are not confusing public with a requirement to distribute the source code under the GPL? Red Hat is complying with that.
What the clones were upset was is that we were providing debranded access to the source code for them for the main release of RHEL to easily repackage and we stopped. They criticized us for that, claiming we went closed source. They are now doing the exact same thing. Only providing source code to those that got binaries.
@sageofredondo@sesivany I'm not claiming Red Hat isn't complying. I'm saying that I think they are probably playing the same game that Red Hat is playing, so one shouldn't throw shade unless they're not going to do it either...
@purpleidea@sageofredondo Yeah, but it's them who critised it so vehemently. They called themselves the guardians of open source with the quest to keep the Enterprise Linux source code always available to the public etc. And then they just silently started doing the same. My post is not about the fact that they're doing it, but about the hypocrisy.
@sesivany Let me summarize: They used free speech as an argument to get free beer, but they no longer intend to share the beer for free. Am I correct? Hmm... I am not completely sure this is how Stallman meant it 😉
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