A couple of days ago, Red Hat published a seemingly innocuous blog entry titled Furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream announcing, among other things, the following:

As the CentOS Stream community grows and the enterprise software world tackles new dynamics, we want to sharpen our focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of enterprise Linux innovation. We are continuing our investment in and increasing our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

I suppose there are at least a couple of ways to read this announcement, and discussing it with other non-legal experts interested in the topic we could not reach any conclusive decision on its real meaning. Will Red Hat completely stop publishing the source code to the binary RPMs shipped with RHEL? Or perhaps they will continue doing so (in the form of source RPMs), but will stop allowing public access to their source code repos? If the latter, I'd say it still abides by the GPL. If the former, I'd say it doesn't. After all, the GPL is very clear setting the requirement that anybody distributing binaries of GPL'ed code also needs to allow access to its source code. In a case like this, if Red Hat (well, IBM truly, its parent company) stops publishing the source, it will obviously be a breach of the license. Now, whether or not someone will take them to court is a different issue. One way or another, it seems clear that this is yet one more move by a large Linux vendor to benefit from the work of the open source community while not totally adhering to its spirit. It is patently obvious that the move is aimed directly at the likes of Rocky Linux, which clone their RHEL product and make it available for free.

As I've written before on these pages, running a commercial Linux distro may make sense for a company, but I'm certainly glad I made the decision years ago to switch to Debian on all my Linux systems. Not only is it stable (and yet, up to date), but it is also free of the constant headaches these other distributions have when it comes to their legal status and long-term business decisions. {link to this entry}