The new license terms for RHEL are structured to stop subscribers from exercising their rights under the GPL. For now they are still providing source code albeit in a less convenient form, but technically they only need to do this for GPL licenses packages and they could remove code for BSD /MIT / Apache licensed packages.
Do these developments make you more.inclined to distribute your software under a copyleft license or are you happy with something more open?
The GPL requires you to distribute the GPL source code along side artefacts generated from it.
Red Hat used to share everything with everyone, they never needed to do that. To meet the requirements they need to share the code sources with licensed customers. This is what they have switched to doing.
This is my problem with the GPL, it feels like a cult of personality built around Stallman. With people assuming its somehow a magical license.
Businesses largely treat GPL as libraries they don’t modify (or legal gets frowny face) so they don’t have to share their code.
The “less free” licenses are generally ok to use and modify (the WTFPL caused fun with legal in one job). If you modify an open source project its normally easy to build a business case/convince a client to upstream the changes.
All the Red Hat changes demonstrate is another step towards an Oracle/Microsoft licensing model. Which is a good reason to not use RHEL or Fedora.
The legal loophole RedHat found I’m guessing is something that might trigger GPLv4 to stop this behaviour (effectively punishing someone for exercising their GPL rights).
You’re right that most use of OSS doesn’t involve modification so it doesn’t really matter, but packaging changes are still useful.
I know Stallman was the strongest advocate of the GPL but personally I like the principle of reciprocity which it enshrines. For all of their contributions it’s important to realise that companies like RedHat are very much building on the work of OSS developers.
Well, considering Linux is using GPLv2, I think it’d be too late for it to help Linux, which is kind of a big deal I guess.