On 2023-07-25 09:19, Gordon Messmer wrote:>>> 5. Red Hat's policy change contradicts the GPL's spirit.
>>
>> As you acknowledge, that's a subjective question.? I would say
"no."
>
> Seriously? You are the only person here who thinks that.
After reading an unrelated thread, I want to make an additional comment:
There are several reasons that I think that Red Hat's subscriber
agreement is in the spirit of the GPL.? One of them is that nothing is
developed in RHEL minor releases that isn't available to the public.? A
RHEL minor release is just a snapshot of the major release branch (which
is now used to build Stream), that Red Hat engineers continue to
support.? Updates to the RHEL minor release are either a direct merge of
changes from Stream, or backporting a fix if Stream has rebased a
package which needs that fix.
If Red Hat were doing development in RHEL minor releases that wasn't
published elsewhere, I would probably have a different view of thing,
but they aren't.? There's nothing there that isn't published
elsewhere.
The *software* is freely available to everyone, through Stream.
RHEL is a *support* program that provides extended support to snapshots
of the software (among other things), by applying patches that are
generally available.
Providing support is not a violation of the spirit of the GPL.
Development all happens upstream, in publicly accessible repositories.?
That's a core part of my outlook on the subject.