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

Posted Aug 4, 2023 0:51 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view by dskoll
Parent article: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

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