I'm going to be blunt, reading this comment makes me think you might be theorizing in an area where you don't have the legal expertise to speak confidently.
> Do you have free speech? Yes, it's your constitutional right. But then you become a lawyer and you get some clients. Do you have the freedom to say whatever you want about your client's case, in public? No, you don't. You have given up your right to exercise free speech on those specific issues.
This is not how copyright law works, we should not be analogizing copyright and the 1st amendment.
> But let's say, you sign a contract to become a PR Spokesman for them. You then mock them publicly, on their official Twitter account. Can you be sued? Yes you can, and your constitutional right will not defend you.
I think this is an oversimplification of how that kind of liability would work, but more importantly, once again, 1st Amendment rights and license agreements are not the same thing, this should not be used as a comparison.
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> Congratulations, that's actually the law right now at a certain level, and what the furor over Red Hat Enterprise Linux was about.
No, using this analogy makes me less confident that you know what you're talking about. Red Hat Enterprise Linux could sever relationships with a client, it could even potentially maybe bring charges over a client circumventing controls to access that code in the future, but it could not bring legal cause against people for distributing the code.
This is not me theorizing on this point, multiple people/orgs decided to keep basing their products on RHEL code and distributing that code and Red Hat didn't have or try to make a legal claim against them. The only thing RHEL could do was say "okay, because of that contract violation, we don't want you as a customer anymore."
> This was later deemed too risky, unworkable, and antagonizing; which is why Alma Linux and others have given up on that approach, and just aim for general bug-for-bug compatibility from scratch.
I think this is a gross mischaracterization of what these orgs did. The full extent of legal risk that I heard anyone in these organizations at all worry about was circumvention of the contract to access new versions of the code after Red Hat had banned them as a customer. I'm not aware of anyone who was scared that Red Hat could sue them over distributing GPL code they already had.
And even there, most of the concern I heard was not over lawsuits but over the practical, everyday unreliability of getting access to new versions of RHEL when their accounts could be closed at any time. When Red Hat was called out as violating the GPL, their entire defense was that they were not putting a restriction on what people could do with the code, they were only adding terms around what you could do while still remaining a customer.
If Red Hat had claimed that they were imposing a restriction that violated the GPL, they would have been opening up themselves to lawsuits, because Red Hat doesn't own Linux and their usage of Linux is bound by them respecting the GPL license under which the code is provided to them -- and the GPL bars them from imposing that restriction. Red Hat does not have the legal permission to impose additional restrictions on the GPL, their usage of Linux code is subject to them respecting the terms of the license they agreed to. So under no circumstances would Red Hat ever claim that they were imposing a restriction on the redistribution of source code of RHEL, the company has been extremely adamant that they are not doing that.
Is your claim here that Red Hat has violated the GPL? Red Hat is claiming that they haven't violated the GPL and that they are not interfering with GPL rights. If they are putting a legal barrier in front of redistribution of GPL-licensed kernel code, then great, I hope that kernel devs sue them -- because Red Hat definitely does not have permission to do that with code that they don't own.