What happened with Fedora - and Red Hat too

Posted Aug 22, 2008 13:20 UTC (Fri) by cdamian (subscriber, #1271)
Parent article: What happened with Fedora - and Red Hat too

> We are issuing this alert primarily for
> those who may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than
> those of official Red Hat subscribers.

What channels are those ? 

I manage a few RHEL servers and they all are updated via RHN.

What happened with Fedora - and Red Hat too

Posted Aug 22, 2008 13:29 UTC (Fri) by spot (guest, #15640) [Link]

"Channels" may have been a poor choice of terminology, given its usage in an RHN context.

Essentially, what this means is:

"We are issuing this alert primarily for those who obtain Red Hat binary packages from sources
other than Red Hat Network."

What happened with Fedora - and Red Hat too

Posted Aug 22, 2008 13:36 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

I assume that some people run RHEL but don't want to pay Red Hat. Red Hat don't provide
binaries to such people, but nothing stops you (a Red Hat subscriber) from taking most RHEL
packages and uploading them to a public FTP server, this isn't even illegal, at least for the
vast majority of packages. People who download those packages have only the RPM signature to
rely on to prove that they're authentic rather than being trojan code you uploaded to exploit
them. Whereas you, as a subscriber have the additional protection of Red Hat's site security.

There's no good reason to do this sort of thing when CentOS exists (and when RHEL
subscriptions are comparatively cheap), but then there's no good reason to climb Everest and
plenty of people do that too.

What happened with Fedora - and Red Hat too

Posted Aug 25, 2008 1:37 UTC (Mon) by duffy (guest, #31787) [Link] (1 responses)

Your statement about Red Hat subscribers having the ability to copy RHEL content ad-nauseum without corresponding subscriptions in place for each copy is actually incorrect. The rules that govern a subscription agreement with Red Hat are different than the rules that govern someone who somehow has a copy of Red Hat binaries yet does not have any subscription agreements with Red Hat. I believe the rules are such that you pay for all or none; you can't just pay for some and be in compliance with your subscription agreement.

What happened with Fedora - and Red Hat too

Posted Aug 26, 2008 12:01 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

That's mostly true, but I don't think it contradicts what I wrote (or at least, it doesn't contradict what I meant). Let's take an easy example, GCC. GCC is a GPL'd package, so Red Hat can't forbid you from uploading their GCC RPM to ftp.example.com and telling other people that's where to get it.

You're correct that this doesn't entitle you, a Red Hat subscriber with say a single machine subscription, to install the packages on a dozen machines and then get support on them all. But it's the subscription agreement you're violating, ie Red Hat are entitled to withdraw all support until you pay for the extra eleven machines, but they are not entitled to force you to stop using or distributing the software since that would exceed their rights as distributors under the GNU GPL.

This is an important reason why RHEL subscription is a better option for corporate entities than Microsoft's equivalent. The Microsoft subscriptions terminate your license to use on expiry of the subscription, but Red Hat don't (for most of the components of RHEL they can't even if they wanted to) do that. All that expires is the support contract. If you find another organisation willing to support your systems you can switch, with no penalty.