refusing to sell you version 6 isnt a restriction on what you can do with 5. it is terminating the relationship going forward.
It seems to me like Rocky wants to stay in bed with RHEL for unknown reasons, so they're playing nice. If there wasn't some benefit to doing so, they could simply anonymize their sources and RHEL et al couldn't prevent them from doing so.
Doesn't this change affect Oracle Linux too? Suing people and even big companies is Oracle's favorite thing to do, and for once they'd be the good guys for doing so.
Paying enterprises that decide to go with Oracle Linux are the real threat to RHEL not the free alternatives.
Very few people that are on the free alternatives will start paying for RHEL if the alternatives go away, it is more likely that they move to another distribution.
This is not even the first time Red Hat try to make Oracle life difficult.
"In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released."
Not sure how long it lasted. It doesn't seem live now, though.
https://www.theregister.com/2011/03/04/red_hat_twarts_oracle...
https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/12/oracle_launches_redpa...
An example of an illegal restriction would be if Red Hat gave their binaries to everyone publicly but only their source to people who agreed to not redistribute it, and then if you did redistribute the source they cut you off or brought some type of legal action.
Red Hat says "bye, enjoy distributing that, no more RHEL for you." You still get to distribute what you already have. That's what the GPL entitles you to - it does not entitle you to a business relationship with Red Hat, ever. But your ability to distribute that source is preserved.
Red Hat releases 10.1. They do not have to distribute that to you, nor give you source code, you're no longer a customer.
Whether this is in line with the spirit of the GPL or not is another story. But at least as I understand it, it does not violate the GPL.
I'm fairly zealous about Free Software and I don't think this is even against the spirit of the GPL.
Many of the writings and talks from RMS on gnu.org talk about how it is perfectly fine for a company to modify GPL'd software for internal use only and not be required to redistribute those changes because you're not redistributing the binaries. If it is fine for companies to do that and not be considered a bad actor violating the spirit of the GPL this seems to me to be in the same moral sentiment. At the end of the day if you have the binary you have source and all 4 freedoms associated with it and you truly control your computing.
Although without legal teeth, in practice wouldn't this become very challenging to keep enforced? The Acme Linux person would be free to conspire with someone who was still a customer of Red Hat, get the 10.1 source code from them (they too could be banned but that's it), and then go ahead and distribute that. RH would have no way to compel the Acme Linux group to reveal who they got it from, they aren't committing any infringement and neither is whoever gave it to them. RH could try to fingerprint the code they gave each customer, but this would be trivially revealed by getting 2+ sources and doing a diff. If RH was tiny with a tiny customer base of small businesses then that could work, but they're so gigantic and with lots of gigantic business customers with 4/5/6 figure employee counts that preventing anyone so much as employed at any of these businesses from making copies of the code and uploading it wherever seems like quite a lift? Obviously said employees could be fired if caught, RH can try to incentivize customers. But still, with proprietary software at the end of the day there is copyright to fall back on as the big stick at the bottom. Copyright affects incentives not just on possible distributors but also consumers, yes someone purely interested as an end user for free might be happy with pirated software but nobody can build new businesses on it and devs even vaguely in the same field are not going to want to even look at it.
But with OSS someone just anonymously uploading each new version of RHEL isn't committing a copyright violation. Neither is anyone downloading/using/redistributing further. So this seems like it'd be hard to do a foundation of. It sort of has the feel of IBM going through the familiar motions it would with proprietary software, but the underlying foundation makes it all different. Another argument is people just wouldn't want to bother going through the trouble, but that too seems somewhat self-balancing? As-in, the more important RHEL's position is and thus the more valuable it is to RH/IBM, the more incentive people have to keep steadily sharing each new version. Conversely if the rest of the world mostly moved on and RHEL became more like IBM's mainframe stuff (still high profit margin but rarely thought of in day to day work beyond a small sphere these days) then the incentive to leak would shrink, but it wouldn't matter anyway.
It's been awhile but I feel like this sort of debate was had in the early 00s back when copyleft was all fresher, just starting to really break out into big business, and more subject to serious legal challenges. And the conclusion was that (assuming GPL held, which it has) while there are a number of theoretical legal ways to sort-of-if-you-squint do a more traditional (non-service) proprietary model with it, the practical realities of trying to do that without the law on your side would be hard. Guess we'll see how that plays out though with a very powerful player trying it?
Well, enforcement is entirely another matter. It might turn into a nightmare of whack-a-mole for Red Hat, I have no idea. I'm only saying that AIUI, Red Hat can do what they're doing and still be GPL compliant.
It may impact the clones' ability to claim "bug-for-bug" compatibility with RHEL, though. At least without making them a focal point for lawyers. But I have no idea how things will spin out from here.
"Conversely if the rest of the world mostly moved on"
This is looking like a possibility. Things are pretty fragmented now as it is with RHEL leading paid Linux, Ubuntu leading unpaid Linux, and each major cloud provider have their own Linux offerings + Ubuntu & RHEL. (Also Debian in there..)
I don't know that this is the smart move by Red Hat. It feels like a gamble to me, but it's theirs to make.
I guess that Legally this would have to be revealed once ACME gets sued. That sounds like an endless game of whack-a-mole to me though.
(Not that fighting a legal battle with IBM is something you can realistically do without losing your business, of course. But legally, I think one would have grounds to.)