> Similar to Amazon/AWS RedHat seems to be moving to Open Source of convenience, where you have portions of your software Open Source when it helps your business, and not so much if it does not.

I guess it’s quite pragmatic from the short- and even medium-term perspective, although it likely may become well poisoning in the long term.

There used to be an understanding that since Red Hat is making a lot of buck on the shoulders of contributors making FOSS available, they have an obligation of giving a considerable amount of goodwill in return. It looks like they are now pulling a Reddit, but making it a long game.

I mean, right now it looks like they are protecting their business (you really want to get paid for having to backport fixes to some library which has been EOLed and forgotten by its upstream half a decade ago, and for all stability promises no vendor is giving!), but it’s opening a way to shittier practices, if you get my drift.

The specs themselves usually come from Fedora first, where they are MIT by default (per Contributor Agreement, at least). So RH can do anything they please as long as they acknowledge the authors (which is done trivially by not mucking with %changelog).

Anything they please likely includes terminating your account if they sniff you using it to avoid the fees or enabling others to do so. If you are contemplating, say, using a Red Hat Individual Developer Access (or what they call it) to redistribute the sources, they have a provision in the terms you have to agree to just against such cases.

I'm interested in how IBM will try to refuse selling to Alma/Rocky/Oracle. You'd think those guys would already have a paid Red Hat subscription. The lawsuits between Oracle and IBM will be epic.

Most T&C have a clause allowing them to simply end any subscription without needing a clear reason. And I doubt rocky or almalinux want to start a cat and mouse game of opening accounts and these accounts getting banned by Red Hat.