What would happen is you as an end user would loose your subscription rights to RHEL as per your contract with Red Hat, but at the same time Red Hat could loose their rights to redistribute software covered under the GPL if the upstream project enforces those rights under the GPL. Also as is explicit in the GPL, even though Red Hat could loose their right to redistribute, you as a downstream recipient of RHEL would not.

So the short answer, everybody looses in some capacity.

Sorry, not "publish" the GPL does not obligate a distributor to publish the source code, but merrily must offer it to people they distribute the binaries to in some form covered by the GPL.

Well they have to publish the source code for any software they carry that has a copyleft license. You are correct that this does not cover all of the software carried by Red Hat in RHEL. This has always been the case.

I disagree that there is any difference between cancelling a current contract and refusing to renew one that is or will soon become expired. Either action, if taken as a punitive measure in retaliation for you exercising your rights under the GPL is against at least the spirit of the GPL and likely, though not tested yet in court, a violation of the GPL as well. My take is that it comes down to the reason for the cancellation or refusal to renew and this reasoning may be the difficult thing to prove in court, although statements made by Red Hat and actions that they did or did not take against others who did not redistribute the sources would go a long ways towards convincing a court.

Basically put, Red Hat has the right (under the GPL) to do business with whom they choose so long as it's not done in an attempt to do an end-run around the rights given in the GPL to downstream recipients of the software. One way to look at it is that it's perfectly legal for a restaurant to refuse service to anyone they want, so long as it isn't discrimination against race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. The moment that restaurant puts up a sign that says, "Whites Only" they are in violation of Federal law.

This is why the statement from the FSF is so important, they actually own the copyrights to a very large portion of software that is redistributed by Red Hat, including, but not limited to:

* The bash shell.
* glibc.
* the gcc and g++ compilers.
* emacs
* Gnome ...this list just goes on and on. The FSF *has* standing to bring litigation against Red Hat for this, and as such their opinion on what Red Hat is doing is *very* relevant.

Now whether they can win in court is, as you say, not a given, but they certainly have standing to bring the lawsuit.

Also consider that if they *really* want to they can update the GPL again (GPLv4 anyone?) and start distributing their software under that, so when they say that what Red Hat is doing violates the spirit of the GPL they do have the power to bring the actual GPL into alignment with the "spirit" for which they refer. Now updating the GPL to a new version is a lot of work and certainly there would be consequences related to acceptance and adoption by the community at large so it's not a simple ask, and I really doubt they would do this just to gain leverage over Red Hat in this particular case, but they can if they really want to and it would be game over for Red Hat if they do, there is very little chance that Red Hat can release a quality product without including at least some GNU software in it.

Generally speaking I would agree with you up until a refusal to distribute is taken as a penalizing action against someone who chooses to exercise their rights under the GPL. As soon as that happens then this changes from Red Hat choosing who they do business with to Red Hat violating the provisions of their own right to redistribute certain software under the GPL and they can loose that right if they persist.

This is more than just what RMS had in mind when he created the GPL a long time ago. The FSF owns the copyright of a not-insignificant amount of software that is redistributed by Red Hat in their RHEL distribution. They intentionally license their software under the GPL which they themselves maintain and are fully aware of the intent of what that license is supposed to mean. When the FSF says that what Red Hat is doing goes against the spirit of the GPL that is a very strong statement from them and they do have the means to back that up with litigation if they so choose.

My takeaway from this is that they are basically saying that they are not aware of anyone having actually had their subscription revoked or refused to be renewed as a consequence of redistributing the sources provided under the GPL and other copyleft licenses from Red Hat, but if they are made aware of such a case they would be willing to at least consider taking some form of action. They are putting Red Hat on notice and without saying as much drawing a line in the sand saying, "this is how far we are willing to let you go with this, don't cross this line".

Now I may be taking some liberties and reading things into their response that I shouldn't be, but to me it is regardless a powerful statement coming from the FSF.

The change from Red Hat is two years old. This statement from the FSF is new.

Alma Linux has switched to a slightly different strategy from the bug-for-bug compatibility one. Rocky Linux is staying bug-for-bug for now. This is good for Enterprise Linux as a whole and for both distros as having the two distros with different strategies adds robustness to EL as a whole.

I also tend to agree with the article and summary. The vast majority of people won't even be able to tell the difference.

In NZ at least (and I would have assumed Australia to be the same) ATMs now dispense $20s and $50s, whereas they used to only dispense $20s, so I would assume that, combined with inflation, has made $50s much more common. In other words, the $50 note is the new $20 and should be much more common as a result.

That's not exactly the "loophole", what Red Hat is claiming is that if you pay to get the binaries, they will give you access to the sources as per the GPL, and you can, as per the GPL redistribute those sources, but if you do they will no longer give you access to future binaries (or sources). So they basically say you can exorcise your rights under the GPL but if you do they will cut you off.

Personally I think this is a violation of the GPL itself as they are punishing you for exorcising your GPL rights. Unfortunately as end users we don't have standing to sue, you have to be a copyright holder of one or more of the GPLed software that is included in RHEL. I think the most likely candidate for this is the Free Software Foundation, who own the copyright on all of the GNU software and utilities including bash, GNU coreutils, glibc, gcc, emacs ... the list goes on and on.

It may be up to a court to decide, but keep in mind that the GPL is written and maintained by the Free Software Foundation who have a vested interest in making sure that it is fully enforceable and very large portion of the software in RHEL is GNU software, so the FSF has standing to enforce against Red Hat. If a court decides that Red Hat did not violate the GPLv3 then the FSF always has the option to "fix" the GPL in a new GPLv4 version, then bump their software up to that version, so at the end of the day, if the FSF decides they don't like what Red Hat is doing they actually hold all the cards, they can make it so that Red Hat has to stop or end up crippling their product to such a degree as to make it very much unusable.

Red Hat is attempting to skirt the GPL by putting their subscription users under contract, basically saying that you can exorsize your rights to redistribute the source under the GPL, but if you do so they will terminate your subscription. I believe that this action of "punishing" a user violates at least the spirit, if not the letter of the GPL.

There is a lot of GNU software in RHEL (e.g. bash, GNU coreutils, gnupg, gcc, emacs ... the list goes on and on). If the Free Software Foundation were to lay down the law to Red Hat then it is almost certain that Red Hat would be in a bad place over this. Basically put Red Hat would loose their license to redistribute all of the GNU software which would effectively cripple their products. I understand that the FSF is already looking into it and if they determine that the GPLv3 doesn't currently block this kind of activity I would expect to see work start on a GPLv4 that does.

Red Hat likes to throw around the term "freeloaders" when referencing the clone distros, but they forget that nearly all of the software that goes into RHEL is software that they got for free from upstream projects. Red Hat is freeloading as much as any of the downstream clone distros are.

Tracking by the retail store like that is done already. The only difference is that they will now be able to track the batch number of the product you buy which is actually helpful to the consumer, it means that if there is a recall on a product the retailer can know exactly who bought from that particular batch and contact them directly to let them know not to consume it. It could even be used to automatically credit the consumer for the product.