Software Freedom Conservancy Goes After Red Hat

Key Takeaways

as is very well established I am not a software lawyer I know crazy who would have guessed but I am very intrigued to see how this whole Red Hat roll source code situation is going to play out my first video was on the original announcement of the changes my second video was on the response to the community backlash and this third video is going to be on this software freedom conservancies take a comprehensive analysis of the GPL issues with the red hat Enterprise Linux Rel business model and if all goes well if nothing else crazy happens this is hopefully going from my last video on this topic at least for now for approximately 20 years Red Hat now a fully owned subsidiary of IBM 34 billion dollars back in 2019 has experimented with building a business model for offering system development and distribution that looks feels and acts like a proprietary one but nonetheless complies with the GPL and other standard copy left terms software rights activists including the sfc the software Freedom Conservancy have spent decades talking to Red Hat and its attorneys about how the red hat Enterprise Linux Rel business model courts disaster and is actively unfriendly to community-oriented free and open source software Foss recent events show that the behavior has simply gotten worse and is likely to get even worse what exactly is the real business model the most concise way to describe Bill's business model is if you exercise your rights under the GPO your money is no good here so Rel offers a support and automatic update contract and as we understand it this contract clearly states that the terms do not intend to contradict any rights to copy modify redistribute and or reinstall the software as many times and as many places as the customer likes though the contract indicates that if the customer engages in these activities the red hat reserves the right to cancel that contract and make no further contracts with the customer for support and update Services basically you have two options you can one make use of your software Freedom rights or two remain a red hat customer in some versions of the contract Red Hat even reserves the right to review a customer to examine how many copies of Rel are actually installed Red Hats lawyers clearly take the position that this business model complies with the GPO though we aren't so sure on grounds that nothing in the GPO requires an entity to keep a business relationship with any other they have further argued that such business relationships can be terminated based on any behaviors including exercising rights guaranteed by the GPL agreements so the GPL only guarantees you access to the current version of the software if they are giving you access to that code that's all they need to give you if they decide okay well that's the last version you get you're no longer a customer anymore that's all they have to give you you are not entitled to anything further whether that is or is not legal is a matter of intense debate and can really only be solved with a court case but one thing is pretty clear there is no doubt that this provision is not in the spirit of the GPL agreement the real business model is unfriendly capricious capricious and cringe-worthy in case you are unclear on the starts the software Freedom Conservancy took on Rel this should pretty much sum it up but the sfc does give them credit where credit is due furthermore the roll business model remains to our knowledge rather unique in the software industry IBM's Red Hat definitely deserves credit for so carefully constructing their business model such that has spent most of the last two decades in murky territory of probably not violating the GPO but that doesn't mean they have never slipped up and I don't just mean since IBM has taken over I mean in the entire lifetime of red hat there are two incidents with a slightly stepped over that line the first violation was with a Fortune 500 company this company was using Rel internally on their servers but they were also offering a product this product made use of send to West Linux now this company didn't ask for support or updates with this sent to West Linux product but some of the packages available on the product were pulled directly from real sources Ren hat wasn't exactly happy with this happening and threatened to revoke support for their internal rail servers unless they paid Red Hats and royalties now the GPL explicitly states that demanding royalties cannot be done you may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this license for example you may not impose a license fee royalty or other charge for exercise of Rights granted under this license now being such a massive company they had a lot of lawyers basically they just said no our legal team is bigger than your legal team and eventually red hat back down they did keep being real customers for a long time into the future now when the SSC learned of this incident they informed red hat that the past Royal to demand was a violation red hat did not dispute nor agree that it was a violation and did informally agree such demands would not be made in the future now this second incident is about directly using Rel so this second company they had a Rel support contract and they realized their contract was a little bit too big and they didn't need as many Rel licenses so they went to Red Hat and said hey can we lower our contract to have less computers on the license Red Hat said sure go ahead and do so under the additional agreement that you go and delete Rel from all of the computers now not under the support contract and again this is a further restriction the GPL agreements give everyone the unfettered right to make and keep as many copies of the software as they like and a distributor of GPL software may not require a user to attest they deleted these legitimate licensed copies of third-party license software under the GPL the sfc informed Red Hats legal department of this violation and we were assured that this additional agreement would not be presented to any Red Hat customers in the future in both these situations we at sfc were worried though merely a tip of the proverbial Iceberg I think if they do something again it is absolutely worth bringing up those earlier scenarios but when nothing happens for five or ten years whether it's for an individual or for a company like this I don't like the idea of just bringing things up just out of the blue but for years we have heard from Red Hat customers who are truly confused it's common in the industry to talk about Rel seat licenses the idea of a seat license is you buy a number of licenses for how many systems can be used at once as opposed to a regular software license where it indicates how many installs you can have so if you have a 25 seat license 25 users at once can be used in that system and many software acquisition specialists in the industry are not aware of the nuances of the Rel business model and do not understand their rights we remain very concerned that real sales people purposely confuse customers to sell more seat licenses and they also remain concerned about GPO violations we fear that it may be through incompetent or malice many real sales people and Business Development professionals May regularly violate GPL and no one knows about it I feel like that's a pretty big statement to make a special when coming from the software Freedom Conservancy if you have some evidence of real salespeople actually violating the GPO that is one thing go ahead and say it but but just as like a general statement ah they might be violating the GPO that is going to be taken by some people as they absolutely are doing it and red hat is evil and red hat can never recover so I'm pretty wary about just making a statement like that but let's shift gears and talk about send to us why was Independence sent to us so important red had a quiet sent to us in 2014 and they'll sort of the canary and the murky coal mine if sentos seemed vibrant usable and a viable alternative to Rel for those who didn't want to purchase Red Hats updates and services the community could rest easy even if there were GPO violations by Red Hat on real send to s's vibrancy assured that such violations were having only a minor negative impact on the Foss Community around rel's code base but all of that changed when red had a quiet send to us initially this was treated like more of a cooperation agreement eventually though Centos was completely canned in favor of sent to a stream and up until very recently Alma Linux and Rocky Linux have fit into this Gap left by sentos now though it's kind of up in the air on whether they can even continue existing the GPL agreements did not obligate Red Hat to make its source code publicly available to everyone this is a common misconception about gpl's requirements while the details of the source code provisioning vary in different versions of the GPL agreement the general principle is that the source code needs to be provided either a along with the binary distributions to those who receive B to those who request pursuant to a written offer for Source in a normal situation with no mitigating factors the fact that a company moved from Distributing source code publicly to everyone to only give it to customers to receive the binaries already would not raise concerns in this situation however this completes what appears to be a decade-long plan by red hat to match maximize the level of difficulty of those in the community who wish to trust but verify that Rel complies with the GPL agreements Rocky Linux and Alma Linux sought to build linux-based distributions that mirrored role releases and is now unclear if they can do that effectively since Red Hat will undoubtedly capriciously refuse to sell them exactly one row service and update seat license at a reasonable price it appears that as of this week one must have at least that to get timely access to Rel source code so it is very clear the software Freedom Conservancy is not happy about the current state of red hat and are not happier about the direction it seems like they are going I don't know where they're going it's entirely possible that one day red hat is another Oracle but it's also entirely possible that where they are right now they never move from I hope that where they are right now they never move from or possibly even revert some of the changes they've made maybe even offering something more akin to traditional Centos and with that we are at the end of The Saga I really hope that unless red hat is like planning to revert everything something else doesn't happen because as much as I enjoy talking about this topic there are plenty of other things out there I want to talk about as well and this has just consumed basically my entire week so let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below if you liked the video go like the 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