The two ways they have for getting source code are kind of funny and easy, and kind of makes fun of RHEL in pulling this maneuver, getting so much community backlash and ultimately having so little effect other than to negatively impact future business. But will they go further to violate the GPL? Or concede defeat? Say what you want, but to cut off paying customers if they share source code which is their right under the GPL is a really bad move that exposes the character of those running the company.
Absolutely. It’s just like the CentIS decision. They had control of the community RHEL clones with CentOS, and then willfully self-destructed. Now they lost control of the ability to control the narrative and set community standards. For what purpose? The mind boggles.
They could have changed the licensing for RedHat accounts to say “you cannot make an account for the purpose of redistributing RHEL for profit” and achieved their goals without sabotaging themselves nearly as bad. Unless they have some closed door agreements with Oracle, I don’t see how they think this is a good path. We just had to halt the rollout of some Rocky servers pending the outcome of this situation. Those servers would eventually have been converted into RHEL for deployment, but now? Nope. We cannot depend on them not to rock the boat. Our software is capable of running on Ubuntu and it looks like that is where we are going.