“In my eyes this move is perfectly within the spirit of the GPL” - The original author of the GPL disagrees with you - going from his recent responses.
- if Red Hat distributes software to you, they also provide access to the specific code and build instructions to build exactly what they distributed to you yourself
- Red Hat will not, no matter what you do, pursue you for copyright violation for distributing GPL licensed code that you get from them. This is true even if it is one of the many GPL packages that they have substantially written themselves using paid software developers.
Because the above sounds a lot like what the GPL was designed to ensure.
In fact, Red Hat does the above even when the license does not require it ( eg. the large amount of MIT stuff they use in RHEL ).
What angers people is that the following is also true:
Red Hat does not provide you code to their product if they have not distributed their product to you. They provide it only to their subscribers. No license, including the GPL, requires them to do this.
If you break the terms of your subscriber agreement with Red Hat, they will terminate your subscription. One of the consequences of this is that they will not distribute FUTURE software releases to you. As per the GPL, they only provide code to people they distribute software to.
The fury around Red Hat is not that they are actually breaking any of the terns of the GPL ( because they do not ). It is because they will not promise to provide you free copies forever to FUTURE copies of THEIR work after you breach a contract with them.
I am not sure what the “spirit of the GPL” is. Is it that? Because that is nothing like the “values” and “community” that I hear people pretending to care about.
e.g. if we think about the US constitution and other similar documents
Or to put another way, Red Hat dissuade their subscribers from exercising their rights under the GPL with the threat of punishment - the termination of your subscription. The GPL is designed to grant you a right and the Red Hat subscriber agreement is designed to prevent it from being exercised. It really couldn't be clearer that this is against the spirit of the GPL. I don't see any other way to interpret what Red Hat is doing.
They explicitly acknowledge that the EULA does not impose restrictions on rights granted by the software licenses[0]:
> 1.4 End User and Open Source License Agreements. [...] This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license.
So users are still free to fork and redistribute any code obtained through the subscription. Red Hat just may refuse to do further business if you do so.
To me the "spirit" of the GPL is in collaboration. All of Red Hats software projects are still available in public forges for anyone to fork and contribute. An evil or antisocial move would be to take Ceph, Podman, systemd, etc behind closed doors and require a subscription that terminates if you exercise GPL rights. But that is not what is happening here.
[0] https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...
If the FSF wants to stop somebody from doing what Red Hat is doing ( which would long term be bad for Free Software in my view ), they are going to have to revise the license.
I guess the GPL4 will just be the next GPL license that the Linux kernel does not adopt as the differences between Free Software and Open Source start to diverge further.
And as I said elsewhere, “the code” is not the value that the RHEL clones are trying to rip off and commercialize.