RH are complying with the terms of the license. They equally gave the right to fire customers if they choose. Given that the customer really has no major incentive to distribute the source, its not a terribly hard decision to make.
On the one hand this is a matter of law, and the law is being upheld.
On thd other hand it's a matter of "spirit" and "community" and other non-legal arguments. Which IMO is neither here nor there. There's always someone who wants you yo do things another way; you can't please everyone all the time.
What I don't get is the fuss. If you don't like the red hat policy then pick another distro. There are plenty to choose from.
What do you mean by "fuss"? Left to interpretation, anything not aligning with your view could be classified as fussing.
I don't use RH so it doesn't affect me personally, but they still hold sway in the ecosystem at present and their practices may inspire others to use orthogonal contracts to disincentivize the use of rights granted by the GPL.
We can choose non-RH today, but can you not picture a future where this is practiced by more than just them? When social practices change in influential places, it can have far-reaching consequences that don't appear related at first. If others didn't look to RH for guidance or examples of how to do business on Linux, I'd be much less concerned.
This happens a fair bit I the OSS space. Non-users have very strong opinions on how companies, that have OSS offerings, should behave. Because the software is OSS, customers, or more often not-even-customers, feel the urge to comment.
Clearly this case is not a legal issue. It's a business issue. And the business case being made by RH is that they choose not to do business with folk who distribute their source. That's novel, but not illegal.
Regarding "business on linux", to all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. Apart from RH, The percentage of users who have ever spent a dime on -any- Linux OS or Linux program is a rounding error from 0. Every second week there's a "show HN" on some new startup or scheme to somehow pay OSS developers.
The "business" of OSS, and business if Linux, is an unsolved problem. RH is at least innovating in the space, although very (very) few have been successful using their model.
Your concern for this innovation is noted, but, with respect, only affects users who are not customers. Which suggests you are less concerned with the business of Linux, and more concerned with getting stuff going free. (Which I get; we all like free things.)
If OSS -could- figure out a viable business model though, then that would allow many more OSS projects to exist, suck less, and make better progress. This would be a huge win for users to have the ability to control their own machines.
Thank you for the thorough reply. It took some time to have the opportunity to return the same respect.
Perhaps I'm not 100% in the group you're referring to, since I'm not really looking to get RH code or packages for free, or use any RPM distro. I'm interested in DIYing it with LFS, KISS, or something else suitable for a single maintainer. So, yes to non-customer, but no to wanting their code for free. However, I don't see any problem with criticizing a business decision while not being a customer. How do you shop for services if not by getting a feel for them from the outside? If I were looking for Linux support, I now know that a RH contract would be legally fragile (i.e. easy to breach and cost myself), and require me to surrender freedoms granted to me by the original software license, which is a net reduction in software freedom.
I think I see the point you're getting to with it being the sole choice of customers whether they want to breach contract to exercise the rights of a license; that choice doesn't affect non-customers per se, but it's a sinister loophole that leads people to trade their freedom to share for support. That has social ramifications, especially if done at scale. One business doing it is different from the majority, or even a trend of businesses doing it.
It would indeed be beneficial to find a fair, equitable, and sustainable business model that allows programmers to put food on the table with their technical work (former package maintainer and bug buster, myself), but how will this market differ from proprietary, if there are orthogonal contracts surrounding the works, providing different benefits with counter-incentives to exercising freedoms? Maybe the big contrast is the "exit" button comes with the source to fork oneself with. :P
I think the closest we've come to workable are sponsorships from companies who have an active stake in whatever software (or related stack) that their revenue depends on. It seems fair at first, but there's no enforcement model, nor does it seem feasible or desirable to form one. There's also the side effect of active development tending to focus on corporate concerns, due to the money coming from them. Some people have been successful on crowdsourcing sites like Patreon. Flattr had a neat model (your monthly budget would be split between every project you tipped/subbed that month), but I never looked into financial reports to see how effective it was at getting funds to projects.
If I look at this contract change through the lens of someone less savvy, then I see the value. That type of user isn't interested in even reading the source, so the support holds more value to them than the freedom to share.
So it goes, September is approaching.. :/
Thanks again for sharing your perspective, it's one of the first decent online conversations I've had in a while. Financially sustaining freedom-related software is a long-standing puzzle, and each solution seems lacking in one way or another.
RH are complying with the terms of the license. They equally gave the right to fire customers if they choose. Given that the customer really has no major incentive to distribute the source, its not a terribly hard decision to make.
On the one hand this is a matter of law, and the law is being upheld.
On thd other hand it's a matter of "spirit" and "community" and other non-legal arguments. Which IMO is neither here nor there. There's always someone who wants you yo do things another way; you can't please everyone all the time.
What I don't get is the fuss. If you don't like the red hat policy then pick another distro. There are plenty to choose from.