Red Hat and the GPL

nothing to do with the RHEL6 srpm.

> - are Red Hat refusing to work with other devs - no

nothing to do with the RHEL6 srpm.

> - are Red Hat trying to protect their business - yes

nothing to do with the RHEL6 srpm.

> - does this really affect other distros - no;

yes it does (you could have inferred that from all the complaints of said 'other distros'). and more than just 'distros' (there're many in-house 'distros' too that every now and then take a look at what RHEL has, e.g., for backports of security fixes, etc).

> they do not use rhel kernel, at least not the rhel ripoffs

childish namecalling doesn't help your cause. i know, i just did it too.

> - do you want to use a rhel kernel - no;

strawman. if you put it this way: "do you want to use PARTS OF a rhel kernel" then you're getting closer to understanding the issue.

> they are very old and have little in common with the vanilla tree

RHEL6 (the topic of this whole discussion) is anything but 'very old'. and it has a lot in common with the vanilla tree, not the least because of RH's own effort to send upstream as many bits and pieces as possible.