In other news today...
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In other news, Microsoft has picked the replacement for Calibri.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
In other news, Microsoft has picked the replacement for Calibri.
It would have saved a lot of heartache if they just bought out Helivectia about 40 years back.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
So if CentOS were to buy an RHEL, they’d be permitted to remix and redistribute it as they’d see fit, and this is the issue that IBM’s lawyers apparently have decided to ignore.
The problem is that they're going to say: "Go ahead and redistribute it. By the way, we will terminate your contract with us."
That's definitely breaking the spirit of "you may not impose any further restrictions", but the lawyer wills argue that they didn't impose restrictions, they just chose not to do further business with you in the future.
This shouldn't fly for anybody reasonably sane.
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@topspin the letter of the GPL explicitly grants the onward redistribution, though. It is uncertain if IBM’s legal position for termination of access would actually fly here.
Consider: you’re CentOS, you buy RHEL, which is ostensibly GPL because it can’t not be. You are legally entitled to give that product for free to other people by the GPL, with all of the rights and protections of the GPL.
If IBM is now saying that, actually, you’re no longer permitted to exercise all of the rights of the licence, then IBM needs to distribute the package that is RHEL under a licence other than the GPL, which it might have a hard time doing since it isn’t the copyright holder of many of the packages in RHEL.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
If IBM is now saying that, actually, you’re no longer permitted to exercise all of the rights of the licence
They don't. You can still exercise your rights however you want with the source / binaries you have already retrieved.
You're just not getting anything new from RH thereafter, since they won't do further business with you in the future.
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@topspin and therein lies the issue - they’re removing your right to access because you used what you were legally entitled to.
The real question is which version of the GPL exactly is in play. I assumed GPLv2 but if v3 is applicable this explicitly has a relevant clause for it, and of course if you are GPLv2, chances are the “or later versions” clause is also present.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ Has more detailed thoughts on exactly how tenuous this is.
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I wonder ... I can create a Red Hat-based Azure image. I can download the Red Hat ${stuff} from/through that. Does that count? I don't see why it wouldn't.
Meaning, can I then go to Microsoft and ask them for the (GPL) sources for the Red Hat stuff that I just grabbed? They're the ones distributing it to me; would they be obliged to provide the sources to me? Or would I need to go to RH directly?
Either way, Red Hat might not do business with you, but not doing business with MS or any of the large VM providers is a different thing.
(Edit: whether courts/lawyers are amused by this idea is a different question.)
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
they’re removing your right to access
You don't have any "right to access", only a contract with RH that will provide you such.
If you get the source code, you have the right to use that under the terms of the GPL, and if you get binaries from them, you have the right to get the source code for it under the GPL. But as long as they don't distribute anything to you, you have no "rights to access".
Again, I don't think this should actually fly.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
So if CentOS were to buy an RHEL, they’d be permitted to remix and redistribute it as they’d see fit, and this is the issue that IBM’s lawyers apparently have decided to ignore.
The problem is that they're going to say: "Go ahead and redistribute it. By the way, we will terminate your contract with us."
That's definitely breaking the spirit of "you may not impose any further restrictions", but the lawyer wills argue that they didn't impose restrictions, they just chose not to do further business with you in the future.
This shouldn't fly for anybody reasonably sane.I guess I don't qualify as reasonably sane. (This is no surprise to anyone who knows me.) I agree it's breaking the spirit, but breaking the spirit != legal, which it sounds like it is.
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@topspin that’s just it, though: RH’s contract in that situation violates the GPL. RHEL as a whole includes GPL software, plus whatever RH added to it. The unified product is also therefore GPL, and RH is distributing code it itself does not own and therefore it cannot apply the further limitations upon that.
Whatever scenario you’re talking about, RH is shipping something that is GPL licensed with a restriction that fundamentally doesn’t fly under the GPL’s terms.
IANAL but I think this is how it is right now though I dare say the question will be resolved by whose lawyers are better.
Whether it should fly is a different question to the legality of whether it legally does right now. Personally I think if you’re going to ship GPL software you should follow the rules for it completely - RHEL managed to make this work very successfully for a while, it’s only since IBM bought them that this has been a problem.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
Whatever scenario you’re talking about, RH is shipping something that is GPL licensed with a restriction that fundamentally doesn’t fly under the GPL’s terms.
That's not technically true. I agree that is's true in spirit, but that leaves open the legal questions.
What they're shipping is GPL software, pure and simple. No further restrictions. The additional restrictions come from a secondary contract between you and them, which does not apply to the code. The code isn't under a different license.From your link:
if you exercise your rights under the GPL, your money is no good here
@jinpa said in In other news today...:
I agree it's breaking the spirit, but breaking the spirit != legal, which it sounds like it is.
There are usually provisions that you can't just skirt things like that.
Imagine a different, hypothetical scenario: In your state, your employer is legally required to give you a minimum of 20 days a year PTO. Your employer is cheap and would prefer not to. So your contract states that you get those 20 days, and you can take them too. You get your paid time off as legally required. But anybody who does that just so happens to get fired afterwards, assuming you're in one of the states where you can fire someone without a reason. That certainly wouldn't fly, even if that sounds similarly "legal".
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@topspin I’m not sure if you’re arguing for or against RH in that analogy! The analogy seems to be arguing that using the thing you’re entitled to and then punished for shouldn’t get to the point where you are punished for it.
By extension I take it you mean that RH shouldn’t be able to punish those who distribute GPL? (Otherwise the analogy supports the opposite of what you’re trying to say?)
I personally have no dog in this race, I don’t use RH or any derivative, but I suspect the outcome of this is being watched very, very carefully by Canonical as to how it might affect Ubuntu in the long run.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@jinpa said in In other news today...:
I agree it's breaking the spirit, but breaking the spirit != legal, which it sounds like it is.
There are usually provisions that you can't just skirt things like that.
Imagine a different, hypothetical scenario: In your state, your employer is legally required to give you a minimum of 20 days a year PTO. Your employer is cheap and would prefer not to. So your contract states that you get those 20 days, and you can take them too. You get your paid time off as legally required. But anybody who does that just so happens to get fired afterwards, assuming you're in one of the states where you can fire someone without a reason. That certainly wouldn't fly, even if that sounds similarly "legal".
The two words why lawyers get the big bucks: "except sometimes".
I agree with your point. But because getting fired is such a big blow, there may be different provisions than for general commercial contracts where a customer has the right to go elsewhere.
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@Arantor I think what RH is doing is wrong and should be considered a violation, I just described the devil's avocado arguments that their lawyers might bring up. And of course I have no idea which side would stand up in court.
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
watched very, very carefully by Canonical as to how it might affect Ubuntu in the long run.
I don't think Canonical cares, it's an attack on Rocky Linux.
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@topspin of course this is an attack on Rocky but consider: if this is ruled that IBM can charge for RHEL, you don’t think Canonical will readjust their pricing as they’re in substantially the same boat?
I think the whole thing is a mess, honestly. The lawyers will be the only real winners, as ever.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
it's an attack on Rocky Linux.
Everybody should just move to Debian and leave IBM crying on their $34 billion acquisition
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@TimeBandit Their customers would be on IBM's side on this. Those who pay for RHEL are corporations, not individuals. Their customers are primarily paying for the service, but if they can get features ahead of non-customers, that's a plus.
The people who would boycott IBM over this are not the people who are paying for RHEL.
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@jinpa did the people who were paying RH care about the existence of CentOS/Rocky/etc before the IBM acquisition?
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@Arantor I know that Red Hat has a complex history. But traditionally, yes, the free tier benefited the paying customers because there would be additional quality control and bug fixes.
What made Rocky different, AIUI, is that it was doing away with the difference between the two tiers.
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@jinpa I thought Rocky was really just replacing CentOS which used to basically be RHEL-without-the-branding, after CentOS got kneecapped. I don’t know the details, as I said I’m not an RH guy, I an firmly over in the Debian/Ubuntu arena.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
they’re removing your right to access
You don't have any "right to access", only a contract with RH that will provide you such.
If you get the source code, you have the right to use that under the terms of the GPL, and if you get binaries from them, you have the right to get the source code for it under the GPL. But as long as they don't distribute anything to you, you have no "rights to access".
Again, I don't think this should actually fly.
I think there's a more subtle problem.
Say, I buy a version of redhat which includes binaries for kernel 4.51 and firefox 69.
Under the GPL, this means I have the right to obtain from redhat the sourcecode they used to build kernel 4.51 and firefox 69.
Under the GPL, I do not have any future rights to obtain binaries for any version, and no rights to obtain source code for any version other than the ones I have binaries for.
I redistribute the 4.51 kernel I got from redhat (with or without source does not matter).
Redhat cancels my subscription.
I can no longer obtain the source code for redhat's version of firefox 69, even though under the GPL I have the right to obtain this.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
I think there's a more subtle problem.
Say, I buy a version of redhat which includes binaries for kernel 4.51 and firefox 69.
Under the GPL, this means I have the right to obtain from redhat the sourcecode they used to build kernel 4.51 and firefox 69.
Under the GPL, I do not have any future rights to obtain binaries for any version, and no rights to obtain source code for any version other than the ones I have binaries for.
I redistribute the 4.51 kernel I got from redhat (with or without source does not matter).
Redhat cancels my subscription.
I can no longer obtain the source code for redhat's version of firefox 69, even though under the GPL I have the right to obtain this.Couldn't Redhat solve that problem by continuing to allow you one-time access to the source for binaries you obtained prior to them cancelling your subscription?
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
What they're shipping is GPL software, pure and simple.
Is it? Or are they shipping a mixture of software with various licenses? All the parts with FOSS licenses are things that you'd retain rights to access (at least of the particular versions you have) but any commercial components might not be covered. (I know GPL advocates would love to claim that this makes everything in the distribution bundle GPL, but I really doubt that a court would agree with that. There will definitely be parts that are not GPL and won't ever change to become GPL, perhaps because they are using the BSD license or the MPL or the Apache License.)
I don't know if RHEL has such components, especially outside of parts used to set the particular installation up.
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@dkf And many distributions include branding which is not under an open license at all.
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Between Fedora and https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/ , it doesn't look to me like there's a big practical difference that would make me care about losing Rocky Linux.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
Between Fedora and https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/ , it doesn't look to me like there's a big practical difference that would make me care about losing Rocky Linux.
Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream (beta) distributions of RHEL.
Rocky Linux (and the old CentOS before IBM bought and killed it) is a downstream distribution of RHEL. You get the stability and compatibility, minus the branding and expensive support contract, and don't become a RHEL beta tester.
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@dkf probably, but that’s mostly irrelevant.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
Redhat cancels my subscription.
I can no longer obtain the source code for redhat's version of firefox 69, even though under the GPL I have the right to obtain this.Canceling your access to future versions of the software does not have to prevent you from accessing current versions. They can make it so your account still works for only those downloads if they want.
I use a few programs that worked that way, though they were a bit looser in terms of versions. (As in "you were a subscriber when 11.5 was released so you can get any 11.5.x we put out".)
For something like Red Hat with new versions of different bits of software released often they could gate access to downloads or repositories based on timestamps. It probably wouldn't be pretty, but it fits the letter of the license.
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
Bierstadt
That's
and means "Beer Town". 
Btw, the nearest Bierstadt I know is a quarter of Wiesbaden:
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
I can create a Red Hat-based Azure image.
But isn't that a BYOL image? That is, you can create it, but you are legally required to have a RedHat subscription to operate it? That would mean RedHat would still be going after you, not Miscrosoft.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
Whatever scenario you’re talking about, RH is shipping something that is GPL licensed with a restriction that fundamentally doesn’t fly under the GPL’s terms.
That's not technically true. I agree that is's true in spirit, but that leaves open the legal questions.
What they're shipping is GPL software, pure and simple. No further restrictions. The additional restrictions come from a secondary contract between you and them, which does not apply to the code. The code isn't under a different license.The license says you are not allowed to impose additional restrictions, without further qualification. Which means not only add them to the license, but impose them by any means including by a secondary contract.
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@Bulb No idea, I don't really use Azure. I briefly searched for information, but didn't go that far. What you're describing would make sense though.
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@cvi I use Azure a lot, it's currently my main work, but I don't use RHEL there, and I'm currently out of office so I won't check. But it does work that way for a lot of resources there. Including Microsoft's own images—those have an option whether you want to buy a license with them or use one you already have.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
Imagine a different, hypothetical scenario: In your state, your employer is legally required to give you a minimum of 20 days a year PTO. Your employer is cheap and would prefer not to. So your contract states that you get those 20 days, and you can take them too. You get your paid time off as legally required. But anybody who does that just so happens to get fired afterwards, assuming you're in one of the states where you can fire someone without a reason. That certainly wouldn't fly, even if that sounds similarly "legal".
I've heard of stuff that's fairly similar to this. The manager at some job gets some kind of bonus when people use less sick leave. So when an employee uses ~80% of their sick leave, they get written up. It's not enough, alone, to get you fired, but you never know when you'll be written up for bullshit reasons, so you want to keep fewer writeups on your file.
Similarly, the UK has a moderately-broadly-used metric of "you used X sick days in Y separate incidents, which is statistically unlikely, so we're going to start assuming that you're just playing hooky." Because, of course, nobody ever uses their sick leave in statistically-unlikely ways: everyone is exactly average.
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@Parody said in In other news today...:
I use a few programs that worked that way, though they were more granular in terms of versions. (As in "you were a subscriber when 11.5 was released so you can get any 11.5.x we put out".)
I was once part of a startup that was on the wrong side of that agreement. Being a startup, they had no negotiating power whatsoever, so when a large customer bought 2.9, with a promise to pay more for 3.0, the customer leaned on the startup to call almost every version of the software 2.9.x, for quite some time.
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@PotatoEngineer I worked for a trucking costing software company. (We also gave advice to trucking carriers who used our software.) We advised one of our customers to give up their largest customer because they were extorting too many freebies out of them. It paid off - their receipts decreased, but their profits increased.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
@Arantor said in In other news today...:
they’re removing your right to access
You don't have any "right to access", only a contract with RH that will provide you such.
If you get the source code, you have the right to use that under the terms of the GPL, and if you get binaries from them, you have the right to get the source code for it under the GPL. But as long as they don't distribute anything to you, you have no "rights to access".
Again, I don't think this should actually fly.
I think there's a more subtle problem.
Say, I buy a version of redhat which includes binaries for kernel 4.51 and firefox 69.
Under the GPL, this means I have the right to obtain from redhat the sourcecode they used to build kernel 4.51 and firefox 69.
Under the GPL, I do not have any future rights to obtain binaries for any version, and no rights to obtain source code for any version other than the ones I have binaries for.
I redistribute the 4.51 kernel I got from redhat (with or without source does not matter).
Redhat cancels my subscription.
I can no longer obtain the source code for redhat's version of firefox 69, even though under the GPL I have the right to obtain this.The way I've been reading this is that you couldn't get FF70 (binary and source) next month because your subscription got cancelled.
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Status: Holy shit, is this the new Funny Stuff thread?
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Status: Confused how @Tsaukpaetra could have confused the status thread for funny stuff
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IBM shooting itself in the foot by taking the gold standard for enterprise Linux and watering it down significantly in a revenue squeeze attempt is pretty funny.
Like it or not, what made CentOS/Rocky/Alma attractive is that they were RHEL compatible and it was absolutely not unheard of to have RHEL on production and these other things in dev/staging for money reasons. Now people are going to be asking whether they should stop using RHEL in production, out of distrust for RH.
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@kazitor Debating the fine points of software licenses and their legal loopholes is pretty funny stuff.
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@jinpa Bernard, is that you?
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Next time you're feeling dumb, remember that you're not as dumb as this guy.
North Korea detains US soldier who crossed border 'without authorization,' officials say
An American soldier who was set to face disciplinary action and was scheduled to be sent home to the U.S. is now being held in North Korea after crossing its border, officials say.
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"In terms of my concerns, I'm absolutely foremost concerned about the welfare of our troop," [Secretary of Defense Lloyd] Austin added. "And so we will remain focused on this."
He knowingly brought this on himself. His welfare is the least of my concerns.
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@jinpa this does not sound like one of the sharpest cucumbers in the tool shed.
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So, (haven't linked because
paywall) it seems the manager of the .mlTLD is getting lots of inappropriate mail (a thousand items "just last Thursday"), and has so far forwarded 117,000 items to the intended recipients over the last ten years (apparently there's a lot of spam). Because.mlis only one keystroke away from.mil.
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@Watson given that Mail is somewhat of a Russian ally, you’d think this would be more… important to get right.
Especially as if you’re able to forward it to the correct places you must have registered various domains at .ml to mirror .mil in the first place. Forwarding on 117k items is perhaps not the most generous act they could be doing for the USA here!
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@Watson given that Mail is somewhat of a Russian ally, you’d think this would be more… important to get right.
Especially as if you’re able to forward it to the correct places you must have registered various domains at .ml to mirror .mil in the first place. Forwarding on 117k items is perhaps not the most generous act they could be doing for the USA here!
The guy is the toplevel country domain administrator for the .ml domain. Until
tomorrowFriday.
'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses
Good thing Mali isn't best pals with Russia right no– oh, shoot
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Amazon customer surprised their £500 laptop was so light, found Weetabix inside
A customer ordered a new laptop from Amazon UK recently but was extremely surprised by how lightweight it was when they received the package. Turns out it had Weetabix inside it instead.
Still better than a chromebook.
