Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model [LWN.net]

Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 29, 2023 14:07 UTC (Thu) by madhatter (subscriber, #4665)
In reply to: Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model by pizza
Parent article: Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

I'm not wading into the larger argument. I was simply responding to your question about who was holding back security fixes, which seemed to me to imply that you thought nobody was, when we'd just been told by an internal employee that they were.

You may be right that "very few issues are considered high-severity", but it's not just a numbers game: those are the very issues for which users most urgently need fixes, and for which there can be least justification for the withholding we are in fact assured takes place.

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Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 29, 2023 14:24 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

Like many (most) things, this seems to be an argument over definition.

I do not consider fixing something in place A before you fix it in place B to be "withholding" it from place B. To me, withholding would be never offering that fix in place B to begin with.

Because by that same argument, RH is "withholding" *all* fixes from CentOS7 until after they are released in RHEL7. A practice that the rebuilders (and their users) were supposedly okay with for a couple of decades.

Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 29, 2023 14:40 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Note, too, that the fix may well be published upstream already (possibly even by Red Hat employees), and RH are simply applying it to the RHEL package.

In this circumstance, it's no more "withholding" a fix than Debian "withholds" fixes that are present in the latest upstream release but not in the most recent Debian package.

Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 29, 2023 14:51 UTC (Thu) by madhatter (subscriber, #4665) [Link] (1 responses)

> I do not consider fixing something in place A before you fix it in place B to be "withholding" it from place B

I do. I'm not saying such withholding is avoidable or reprehensible or surprising or unique to this case, but it *is* (to my mind, and apparently to mcatanzaro's mind) happening. If you don't want to think of it as such, that is of course up to you, but you might want to better define your terms before making general statements.

> Note, too, that the fix may well be published upstream already (possibly even by Red Hat employees), and RH are simply applying it to the RHEL package.

I don't see how it would have been published by RH employees, given that we've been told they are forbidden from working on it under those circumstances. If the upstream fix already exists from another source, and they're forbidden from pushing it through the CentOS pipe simply because it has not yet been pushed through the RHEL pipe, well then, that's withholding.

Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 29, 2023 15:55 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

A fix may be published upstream first simply because at the time of fixing, the author didn't realise that they were fixing a security issue - this was just part of normal bug fixing when you take part in upstream development (and note that RH employs a lot of people who take part in upstream development). And the further behind the RHEL version of a package is, the more likely this is to be true, since you're less likely to remember all the development that's happened between the RHEL version being picked, and you making this fix.

And while it's a workable definition of "withholding", it does mean that any time you ship a released version and not the latest development tree, you're withholding fixes and features from your users - this isn't what most people think of when you say that things are being withheld.