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Comment by derekp7 | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago RedHat limited access to the detailed (broken out) kernel patch set they use, to RHEL customers, and only publish the combined blob for anyone else. It was discussed if a RHEL entitlement holder would then be able to share that out, however that would cause the RHEL subscription to then be invalidated as that was against the subscription contract.

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> It was discussed if a RHEL entitlement holder would then be able to share that out, however that would cause the RHEL subscription to then be invalidated as that was against the subscription contract.

Isn't IBM violating the GPL with such a contract, in particular this sentence of it? "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."

The way I recall it explained, is no they aren't -- they aren't preventing you from redistributing (or doing whatever you want with the source), but if you exercise that right, they cancel your RHEL entitlement. Nothing in the GPL forces a company to continue providing services to you because you followed your GPL rights. Kind of a loophole I guess. (Edit: I had read through GPL 2 quite a bit back in the day, I don't know if this loophole was plugged in GLP 3, as I've only read through it a couple of times and there were some things in it that I wasn't able to draw a conclusion from. And I could also be completely wrong about the RHEL contract, that I haven't read through for quite a while).

close, but it is more akin to a poison pill in the contract. You still have a license to the code, they just aren't going to distribute the product in any capacity to you any longer.

I'd like to point out that if customers of IBM like the Department of Defense or Department of State wanted to flex on IBM a bit, they could just start publishing all of this. Then dare IBM to cancel all the federal support contracts.

It's not that you can't redistribute it, it's just that you can never continue because you are no longer receiving binary releases or subject to the GPL.

If the contract doesn't outright prohibit people from exercising their GPL rights, then someone might be able to publish the source code anonymously to prevent their subscription from being terminated.

And continue to publish it. And then Red Hat might start watermarking downloads.

It would be tough to sustain such a plan.

Is it possible to watermark GPLed source code without violating the license? I was under the impression that GPL requires publishing the exact source code used to build the binary, which means no watermarking.

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