IBM can't "kill" Fedora. All the specs files, the assembly mechanisms for the distribution is available online. The community can (and has) forked fedora and keep it going under a new name, if they wanted to.
But this is all backwards.
> Why should IBM maintain rolling updates into Fedora
The better question is why is IBM maintaining rolling updates into Fedora? Because they have a business incentive to do so. As other comments have opined, they get free testing, free feedback of upcoming changes. The community gets a lot in return. RedHat funds so much open source/free(dom) software development it's ludicrous. There's reciprocity here. There's a lot of other distributions also benefiting from RedHat's work, like Debian (and vice versa).
It seems like the community here on HN has gone complete bonkers over this RedHat business decision. We've reached a next level of open source entitlement syndrome.
We are not entitled to use RHEL for free. We are not entitled to repackage RHEL and sell it for free either. We are only entitled to those part of the source code which is covered by copyleft licenses. Are we entitled to the SRPM for those programs? We don't know. The patches applied, sure. How about the spec files to assemble the RPMs? Who knows. But it seems like everybody are demanding that RedHat should keep doing this work and ensure that third parties can keep their business model of reselling said work.
This is probably not a popular opinion, but the community seem to have a deranged take on this situation.
We are only entitled to those part of the source code which is covered by copyleft licenses.
No, we're not. Even for code covered by copyleft licenses, we are only entitled to the source for which we have received a binary. However, once we have received those sources, we should be free to do with them whatever the license allows.
But that last part is what Red Hat is violating, and that's why some people have a deranged take, thank you very much: they use their sales contracts to specifically deny freedoms granted by copyleft licenses.
If you as a Red Hat customer redistribute the source code, Red Hat won't sue you. You didn't do anything illegal, you are doing what you are allowed to do.
Nothing in the GPL entitles you to future support from Red Hat, source code of future versions or anything of the sorts.
You're free to do whatever you want with the sources. Red Hat is free to stop business with you at any time. There's nothing contradictory here.
No, this is conflation everybody is having. You are free to do with the received source as you like, maintaining your rights granted by the GPL.
But the GPL does not compel RedHat to keep you as a customer. There are two separate legal instruments, the license for the source and the terms for RHEL. RedHat are free to chose their customers. We can't force a company to take us on as a customer.
Since we're generalizing: most devs aren't great at writing documentation either.
Technical writing is a field of its own and it's important to recognize that. We could ever be so lucky if such writers were as attracted to free software as some developers are.
Redhat debranded RHEL for CentOS. It was one of the things CentOS compalined about, so RedHat made it easier for them. Maybe it saved RedHat money overall by avoiding trademark protection (IANAL).
They could also release just application source code and not the spec files for building the package. It's the spec files and the patches that's central in this conflict, not the actual source code, but people keep conflating the two.
Red Hat may release spec files to conform to the requirement that source code includes "scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable."
Note that this particular requirement got a fair amount of attention in 2011 when Red Hat changed its kernel source releases and stopped breaking out patches. (Here: https://lwn.net/Articles/430098/)
Hard to judge if that covers just makefiles or if it also covers rpms. Guess it makes sense they should share the scripts required to rebuild the binary as it's delivered by them
Yeah. Here I see Red Hat trying hard to live up to the letter and spirit of the GPL, but it's not getting appropriate credit on that one.
In some ways I think of the GPL(s) like the Bill of Rights. Great document, great ideas behind it - falls flat in some respects today due to age and ambiguity.
Yeah, but not many companies are like MS and let one or two cash cows carry all the other ambitions, many companies prefer each unit be profitable. OpenShift might be printing money, but clearly the RHEL division isn't.
RedHat creates and drives development of many OSS projects. FreeIPA, strimzi, systemd are some examples. Anybody can use these projects without using the RedHat labeled version. But none of this projects would be well maintained without RedHat.
