I admit I know nothing about what programs RedHat has contributed to, or what their plans are. I am only familiar with the GPL in general (I use arch, btw). So I tried to have Bing introduce me to the situation. The conversation got weird and maybe manipulative by Bing.
Can you explain to me why Bing is right and I am wrong?
It sounds like a brazen GPL violation. And if RedHat is allowed to deny a core feature of the GPL, the ability to redistribute, it will completely destroy the ability of any author to specify any license other than MIT. Perhaps Microsoft has that goal and forced Bing to support it.
Can we stop pretending that ML chatbots know what they’re talking about? They don’t.
If Microsoft is using its bot to push an agenda, that is worth talking about. You won’t be able to convince everyone to not listen to bots.
What makes you think that this is an intentional action by Microsoft?
Bing Chat is wrong. RHEL customers are legally allowed to share the code. What Red Had can do, and that has nothing to do with the GPL, is to end the contract with the customer who shared the code, thereby according to the GPL the customer also no longer has any right to access the code. The GPL only applies to software distribution, not contracts outside copyright law.
Edit: Red Hat is under no obligation to share non-copyleft code of which there is plenty in a Linux distribution but they do. Just look at Apple: Take plenty of FOSS code, give back only a fraction. It sucks but it’s legal. That’s also why Apple moved away from GPL software – can’t even bothered to ship BASH with macOS.
Yes. I just don’t know if it’s good to phrase it as “RHEL customers are legally allowed to share the code”, since as soon as they do it they won’t be allowed to be customers anymore lol (assuming Red Hat finds out)
Whether RedHat is violating the GPL by cancelling the contracts of customers who exercise their rights under the GPL is an open question. There certainly is not a consensus on this in the open source community, the Software Freedom Conservancy seems to lean toward the view that RedHat’s new policy is in violation - https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
However the only way to find out is for someone to challenge RedHat in court. IANAL but if you could demonstrate in a court that RedHat has actually had a pattern of behavior where they are canceling contracts whenever people exercised their rights under the software license, I think you might have a pretty good case. IBM for their part has good lawyers and is basically saying bring it on, this is business.
There are a lot of factors at play here. And I think a lot of people don’t understand them all. Not all software is under GPL, so to say RHEL is under the GPL is wrong. Parts of it are, but not all of it. But let’s take a GPL package, like the kernel. The kernel itself is GPL, but that doesn’t mean the packaging code is, ie the source rpm that was written by Redhat (not the build tools and makefiles distributed with the kernel).
I don’t know what if any license the packaging code is, for any distros. It is not normally something people think about. But as far as I understand the GPL I do not think it automatically includes the code used to package applications written in it.
So it is not as simple as most people think it is. Redhat likely do have a claim to be able to restrict others from distributing their packages, just not the application code inside the packages.
Though doing so is a massive dick move on their part.
“programmed to” sounds like a human sat down and wrote explicit instructions for how to answer this specific question. It might also just be that the language model was trained on texts that predominantly said that RHEL is not violating the GPL. I don’t think anyone outside Microsoft can know which one it is.
It’s simple: they can redistribute it since it’s GPL, but if they do so, they break their business contract with RedHat, so they’re not customers anymore and can’t see the source code in the future.
GPL doesn’t mean that they must give the code to everyone, only that you have those rights as long as you have the software. So RedHat is not forced to have everyone as a customer, and according to them, distributing the code kicks you out.
They can still re-distribute the current source they have, but will not have access to future source code.
That is just denying redistribution with extra steps.
