The day was coming, but I don’t think anyone expected it to happen so soon. I’ve talked with various people at Red Hat over the years and it’s no secret that the Red Hat clones (namely CentOS in previous years, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux as of late) have been a thorn in their side. While after Red Hat took over CentOS, the rebuild was still happening. That seemed to change after IBM took over Red Hat in 2019. CentOS 8 was killed off prematurely which sparked AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. Hell, even Oracle has been repackaging RHEL under their own brand of Oracle Linux for some time now.
As of yesterday, June 21, 2023, Red Hat announced a change in location of the RHEL source code. For a while now, Red Hat was placing the RHEL source at git.centos.org out in the open for anyone to grab. In fact, this is where Rocky Linux was pulling packages from. What Red Hat announced was a change in location of source code. Instead of publishing it in the public, they are publishing it for subscribers.
According to the agreements, Red Hat could revoke the subscription of anyone found to be pirating open source software. That’s a phrase I never thought I’d ever say…
I just wonder if Oracle will be dragging IBM to court over GPL violations?