[CentOS-devel] Announcing ROSI - RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure

On Friday, February 26, 2021 8:42 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:

> On 2/25/21 11:34 PM, redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel wrote:
>
> > On Thursday, February 25, 2021 8:26 AM, Mike McGrath mmcgrath at redhat.com wrote:
> >
> > > Hi all, as I did last month I thought I'd keep the list up to date with today's free RHEL announcement:
> > > https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux-open-source-organizations
> > > This one is targeted at Open Source projects and organizations.
> >
> > This is confusing because we just got from Bex a statement to NOT use Red Hat subscription service if the goal is producing a Linux distribution.
> > His blog post is available here:
> > https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2021/02/03/a-guide-for-using-centos-project-code/
> > Now Red Hat is offering Red Hat subscription services for Fedora and CentOS Stream which both have the goal of producing a Linux distribution.
> > In fact, Bex's post is one of the key reasons I dismissed the RHEL offering.
> > Previously, with CentOS when the version of PHP contained a critical bug, I was able to release for users of CentOS a drop in replacement for the PHP package with a 15 line backported fix applied. Going through RH Bugzilla to get the patch applied normally takes months (if it ever gets applied). It sounded from Bex's post like using RHEL to rebuild the CentOS package is not allowed.
> > Does this new announcement mean there will be any revisions to Bex's blog post?
>
> I don't think so.
>
> Red Hat is offering RHEL for Open Source organizations to use. If you
> want to get information on this, discuss it with the mailing address in
> the article. I would suppose the intended target of this are
> foundations like Apache, GNOME, etc. But, I am not a lawyer, or a RHEL
> subscription expert.

Am I the only one that sees the irony in this?

FOSS organizations can use RHEL to create a Linux distro project but only if a Red Hat employee is on the goverance board of the project?

The offer is provided to Fedora approved software licenses.  While Fedora has approved documentation and font licenses, the no cost RHEL offer does not seem to apply to open documentation and open font projects.  Looking at only the Fedora approved software licenses, the list appears to be a subset of the Open Source Initiative.  The page of Fedora approved software licenses even links to the OSI.

The RHEL EULA does not attempt to follow the OSI's Open Source Definition.  As qualified by Bex's post, the EULA does discriminate against a field of endeavor (using RHEL to create a Linux distribution).  But at the same time, historically CentOS was the preferable distribution for FOSS projects which isn't at odds with the Open Source Definition.

What is promoted now is migrating to RHEL and a EULA that is at odds with the Open Source Definition.  This is not the first time this type of issue has come up.  Trolltech also attempted with the Qt Library to provide it for no-cost to FOSS projects while having terms which discriminte against fields of endeavor.  At the time Red Hat took a strong stance against the Trolltech business model.  At the time pressure was put on Trolltech to change their business model by refusing to include Qt/KDE with Red Hat Linux.

Now Red Hat is promoting the same Trolltech business model they took such a strong stance against.

Was the objections to Trolltech a mistake or do the objections no longer apply when it is Red Hat doing it?