Two words: [LWN.net]

Two words:

Posted Jun 24, 2023 14:46 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
In reply to: Two words: by Subsentient
Parent article: Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

You're missing that:

1) this is not just Red Hat's idea, I even found an article from 2006 (https://lwn.net/Articles/178550/) where the FSF said they were fine with this

2) this is not a new idea either, all the extended-update minor releases of RHEL were never available in CentOS. CentOS only ever had the first 6 months of updates after which it rolled to the next RHEL minor release.

So if nobody has thought that this was a GPL violation until now, why would they start now?

to post comments

Two words:

Posted Jun 24, 2023 18:27 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

> 1) this is not just Red Hat's idea, I even found an article from 2006 (https://lwn.net/Articles/178550/) where the FSF said they were fine with this

It kinda is is RedHat's idea. Or, rather, it's Cygnus idea. Only initially it was applied to GCC and autotools. And later RedHat bought Cygnus and used it to make RHEL. But that idea was invented years before Linus published it's infamous letter and years before RedHat was created.

And FSF couldn't, really, say that it was Ok for 30+ years and now, suddenly, it's bad, bad, bad, not allowed.

Two words:

Posted Jun 25, 2023 3:52 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> And FSF couldn't, really, say that it was Ok for 30+ years and now, suddenly, it's bad, bad, bad, not allowed.

Well, probably* not for GCC or any GNU code, but they could support a lawsuit by anyone else whose code is in RHEL. But first you'd have to convince that person that there is a violation worth pursuing, and having read Kuhn's article, I don't think they have a terribly strong case. Maybe they'd win, but personally, I would not want to get involved in a lawsuit with this many question marks.

* There is likely some theory of estoppel that bars such a claim, at least in common law jurisdictions. You can't tell someone "oh, yeah, you can use my software like that, the license I gave you allows it," and then change your interpretation of the license after they have done so.