Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Suppose you pay $1000 for a one-year support contract, and then a month later exercise your rights under the GPL.

You can “exercise your rights under the GPL” with the GPL code in your copy of RHEL until the cows come home – you can modify it, distribute it in original or modified form, etc. as specified in the GPL –, and this applies equally no matter whether you have an active paid-for RHEL subscription, whether Red Hat has cancelled it, or whether you just let it expire. After all, that's what the GPL says, and we can reasonably assume that Red Hat's lawyers know the GPL very well, and that Red Hat doesn't want to be sued by the copyright owners of GPL code in RHEL.

The question as far as Red Hat is concerned, however, isn't whether you “exercise your rights under the GPL”, it's whether you abuse your support contract with Red Hat by giving someone else the benefit of a RHEL subscription (e.g., by feeding them the RHEL updates you get from Red Hat so they don't need to buy their own subscription). In that case Red Hat may decide that they do not want to give you further updates under that support contract, which is fair enough – presumably they like being ripped off as little as any other company. But this is in no way, shape, or form a GPL issue because your “rights under the GPL” are not touched by this at all; getting updates to code is expressly not a GPL right.

If you exercise your rights under the GPL, Red Hat may well still let you keep the support contract - the relevant behaviour is not "exercising your rights under the GPL", but "giving a third party the benefit of the Red Hat services". So, for example, if you give me a copy of the Red Hat version of the kernel, so that I can debug a kernel issue for you, no breach has taken place, and Red Hat won't terminate. Or, for another example, if I'm paying for the original author to support rp-pppoe for me, and I send them a copy of Red Hat's source and binaries for rp-pppoe so that they can apply the fix to the RH version for me, that's also going to be fine with Red Hat - I'm not giving away the benefit of my RH contract to a third party, I'm paying a third party to give me more benefits than RH does (presumably because the original author of rp-pppoe is better at supporting my use case than RH are).

If you do give a third party the benefit of the RH services, then you are in breach of contract, and you lose your support contract. In such a circumstance, Red Hat's terms section 3.1 says:

All Fees, expenses and other amounts paid under the Agreement are non-refundable. The Software Subscription Fees are for Services; there are no Fees associated with the Software licenses