Keeping Open Source Open

Other open source competitors like SUSE and Canonical have much smaller revenues, so Red Hat could be seen as having a bit more influence over Linux's overall direction (they employ a ton of devs, they have a ton of resources). Case in point, the systemd controversy.

There's also a historic argument that one cannot trust FOSS in the hands of any corporation, but we start getting into more philosophical and nearly-religious debate at that point.

tl;dr - GPLv2 requires no restriction on free/paid recipients of binaries to also freely redistribute source code. Red Hat EULA says your subscription will be canceled if you redistribute the source code. Is that a restriction?

A couple OSS laywers I spoke to said no. Common sense says it feels an awful lot like intimidation to effectively keep their product proprietary (what Fortune 500 company would like to have their Red Hat servers all go dead because some employee downloaded sources and uploaded them somewhere?)

lolwut?

That word does not appear at all in TFA.

In the IBM/RH blog post it references[1] the word appears once, disparagingly, in the gratis sense.

I appreciate the beer / speech distinction can get tiring to explain repeatedly, but it feels like the move to distance themselves from the deeper implications & obligations of free is, shall we say, very carefully calculated.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-sour...

The whole purpose of a SRPM is to take some upstream source code and repackage it into a different archive blob which has to be downloaded in its entirety and unpacked in order to determine whether any of the code is patched, or pure upstream.

If, instead of a SRPM, you have some small, declarative text file which gives upstream URLs, SHA256 digests and build config steps, then that tiny declarative text file is all that someone needs from you to clone that package in their own distro, exactly The amount of material needed to repro your whole distro goes something like from gigabytes to megabytes.

I mean, think about it. There is such a little declarative piece there in the process: the RPM spec file. Now, normally we think about building binaries from sources. But under RPM, you "build" source packages too! It's an obfuscation step intended to make people dependent on your way of handling sources.