Amazon, Azure, etc don't freely provide RHEL binaries to their customers.

Note the word "freely". I can't speak for Azure, but Amazon's RHEL instances cost extra -- either you pay up-front for the per-instance RHEL license (and then it's just a regular instance running RHEL) or you pay an amortized fraction of it per instance-hour. Either way, you (ie the customer) has to agree to the RHEL licensing/subscription terms.

Based on Cadence's product roadmap, your organization has a choice of RHEL8, RHEL9, SLES15, and four different versions of MS Windows.

If your organization is too cheap to run their revenue-generating software on the one of the platforms it requires, then you have some truly braindead decision makers in charge.

(At $dayjob-2, we averaged about $50K/seat/year to Cadence. RHEL license fees were literally a fraction of a percent on top of that)

I quite agree! Alma's approach is precisely what Red Hat said they wanted, with upstream and downstream participation, investment, and differentiation. Unlike Rocky (and Oracle, bah) whose goal to rely entirely on Red Hat engineering for all the actual work, and undercut Red Hat's pricing with "support" contracts that are little more than filing bug tickets against RHEL)

(Though in fairness to Oracle they at least provide their own kernel on top of their 1:1 RHEL rebuild, and do a decent amount of upstream Linux development too. But seriously, Fuck Oracle.)

First, the GPL gives you rights to the complete corresponding source code of the software you have in your hand RIGHT NOW. It _explicitly_ says you are not entitled to any warranty or support on that software (though it may be "provided for a fee"), nor does it say that you are owed any _future_ versions of that software. Indeed, the GPL says that a user exercising source rights can be used as grounds for ceasing warranty/support (section 6, paragraph 6, IIRC).

Secondly, just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean you're obligated to exercise that right. (Otherwise I could demand that *you* provide me with the source code for the GPL software you received from someone else. Telling me to go pound sand isn't automatically a GPL violation!)

Thirdly, It is not a violation of the GPL to place conditions on on something the GPL explicitly says it doesn't cover.

So, no, it's not a grey are at all. The FSF and others (SFC) don't _like_ this, but they all agree that it's kosher. Note that this isn't a _new_ problem; this has been the basis of Red Hat's business model going back over twenty years now, ie well before the GPLv3 was drafted. Before that, this tactic was used by Cygnus with GCC (ie an actual FSF/GNU project!), starting a few years before the GPLv2 was drafted. Instead of taking steps to close this "loophole", If anything, the language permitting it has been _strengthened_ in each successive GPL version, making arguments about how this is somehow a violation of the "spirit" quite silly.

(Because the alternative is to _require_ Free Software authors to provide warranty and support to everyone, forever, effectively for free. Don't worry, various national legislatures are trying to make that a reality)

Hey, you're the one claiming that you're somehow entitled to permanent access to Red Hat's derived work.

But no, Red Hat's lawyers will win this argument because (1) they have literally centuries of contract law on their side, and (2) they are *correct* and consistent with the law and letter (and spirt!) of the GPL. Ironically, folks that are arguing that Red Hat is in the wrong here are themselves taking a position that violates the letter (as well as the spirit) of the GPL.

Please get your facts straight.

Red Hat EOL'd CentOS 8 prematurely, in favor of CentOS Stream 8. That was *two years ago*. Nothing changed with CentOS7.

Meanwhile. CentOS7 will be EOL'd in mid-2024, when RHEL7 enters its extended support period (ie the latter five years of its ten year lifecycle. Just like CentOS6 was EOL'd when RHEL6 entered extended support. And version 5 before that. And version 4 before that.

Red Hat has _never_ publicly provided binaries or sources to non-customers for these extended support updates. (Incidently, SuSE or Canonical do the same, and also have clauses in their support contracts that allow them to drop you as a customer if you redistribute things. So congatulations for finally noticing what that status quo has been for the past two decades)

Absent a contract stating otherwise, nothing entitles you or I to any of Red Hat's products or services. Just as nothing entitles me to your current (much less future) work.

Says Red Hat's lawyers, you mean.

I recommend you look up the term "promissory estoppel"

I also recommend you actually *read* the GPL, notably what it has to say about support and warranties.

There is no such restriction, and that is explicitly stated in the RH subscription agreement, section 1.4:

"This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license."

You (and most other folks here) are confusing the *software* with the *support*. You retain all GPL/etc rights to the software, as the RH subscription agreement make perfectly clear -- and you can also get that same software from multiple other places! However, nothing entitles you to get the software (and future updates/support) from Red Hat specifically without agreeing to their subscription terms.

Again; You have no intrinsic right to receive software, support and updates from Red Hat; they owe you *nothing* without a contract stating otherwise.

But waaah, free software principles bla bla bla!

The GPL only guarantees you the right to receive complete corresponding source code to the specific software you have in your hands, and use/modify/redistribute under the GPL. It does not entitle you to receive future versions of the software, be they in source or binary form. It does not entitle you to a warranty. It does not entitle you to support.

I direct you to the GPLv3 section 15, plus section 4, paragraph 2, which explicitly states that warranty and support (and thus updates) are out of scope of the GPL, while also stating that a warranty and support "may be provided for a fee." Furthermore, the GPLv3 section 6 paragraph 6 explicitly states that a user exercising their source code rights is sufficient cause for you to cease providing warranty, support, and updates! So much to RH violating the "spirit" of the GPL!

I also feel compelled to point out that SuSE and Canonical have always placed similar restrictions with their SLES and Ubuntu Pro offerings, respectively. Yet there seems to be a conspicuous absent of outrage over them.

Maybe you should yell at the actual broken software instead of the messenger that pays attention (ie systemd) and reports what's going on instead of blithely ignoring problems (ie sysv/openrc) and risks data loss by not giving things sufficient time to shut down cleanly? As for your alleged startup problem, systemd's vastly superior status reporting and logging will let you precisely pinpoint what is going wrong, and why. Or you can just keep complaining and expect other people to fix all your (likely self-inflicted) problems for you.

Meanwhile, my anectdotal 'data' has several dozen diverse machines (including VMs) working just fine going back well over a decade, except in cases of hardware or total network failure (eg attempting to unmount remote filesystems with unflushed writes causes all sorts of stuff to break, badly)

(And "over a decade" is quite accurate -- Fedora completely switched to systemd twelve years ago)

Two points work against your argument.

1) The GPL says that covered software is provided "AS-IS" with no warranty, etc etc. It only ensures that you have the rights to obtain the complete corresponding sources (and redistributionmidification rights) for the version you have in your hands RIGHT NOW, not some or all future versiosn of the software.
2) The GPL also says that you may charge for binaries and/or support, but you are under no obligation to support or provide future updates if someone exercises their source rights under the GPL. Yes, it says you can drop support if the user merely *obtains* sources from you!

As warranty and updates.explicitly lie outside the scope of the GPL, a separate agreement/contract is necessary. And that agreement can contain (nearly) any terms the two parties can agree on [1]. If you violate that agreement, you lose access to the benefits that agreement gives you.

Since the GPL doesn't grant you rights to obtain future releases of the software (indeed, it says the exact opposite!) it's not a GPL violation if a separate agreement (ie the same agreement that gave you the rights to get those updates in the first place) places conditions on your ability to get those updates.

You don't like it, that's fine. But at the end of the day, what RH is doing is both in compliance with the letter, and spirit, of the GPL. The FSF has now had *two* opportunities to address this very scenario, ie during the drafting of the GPLv3 and GPLv2 [2] and if anything, has further strengthened the language making it clear that this sort of thing is permissible.

[1] As long as there is no coercion, you can even waive fundamental human rights in a contract.
[2] RH has been doing this since RHELv1, five years before GPLv3 was drafted. And before that, Cygnus took this approach starting in the late 80s with GCC, at least a couple of years before GPLv2.

Reddit is unique (vs other "social media") in that it's not the network effect that gets people together, it's the actual subject-focused sub-reddits. There's no inherent reason why any random sub can't just up and move to a different platform -- Especially now that there are actual viable alternatives such as lemmy.

...Thereby completely changing the "feel" of a given sub. Has that _ever_ worked out in the longer term?

Reddit seems to be making the mistake in thinking that the _platform_ is what provides the value to the users, forgetting that without making (and keeping) the platform attractive to users, there's no users, and thus no content to monetize.

Actually, no, they aren't easily replaceable -- these aren't "oh I'll just volunteer to moderate random subs" volunteers that are handed their assignments every day. Instead, these moderators care a great deal about a specific sub/community, and are largely responsible for the culture and general community building, as well as typically being highly active posters in their own right. If they walk and set up shop elswhere, so will a significant portion of the active userbase (ie the users that actually _create_ posts of value), because it's those users and their posts that provide the value, not the platform itself.

The moderators are probably the most important users on the site. Without them, reddit would be a complete cesspool of spam or worse.

So, pissing off the moderators by taking away the tools they need to actually perform said moderation (because the official website and apps are nearly worthless, usability wise) isn't exactly a path to success.

Lose the moderators, they lose the user base. Lose the userbase, and they no longer have eyeballs to sell to advertisers. Lose those advertisers, they no longer have a business. /shrug

Reddit has been making money off their moderators without paying them anything. What do they think is going to happen?

That 87,000 number includes folks working on IT systems, answering phones, processing paper tax returns, updating forms and documentation after every congressional circle-jerk and all sorts of other mundane tasks.

And yes, some of those 87,000 are armed enforcement agents. Which I'd have thought the Republicans would be in favor of, as they still go on and on about "lax" law enforcement. Unless of course it's against one of their own.

Meanwhile, every $1 spent on the IRS yields a roughly $6 increase in revenue, with no change in laws. One would think that investing in something with a six-fold ROI would be a no-brainer?

There are plenty of fanless 10G switches.

If you put "10G switch" into Amazon, all but one of the first page of results are fanless. (And the one that has a fan is a 48-port PoE unit)

...Not any OS, just the ones given away for free.

You can't ship an iOS or MacOS product without getting a cease-and-desist from Apple's lawyers. You can't ship a Windows product without paying Microsoft for the OS. I'm not saying MS charges very much money, but it's infinitely more than the zero Google gets.

Anyone can ship a product built on Android without paying Google a penny. But if you want to take advantage of Google's services (store, accounts, provisioning, updates, etc etc) someone's going to have to pay the piper. Right now the status quo is that the up-front price is $0, and the services are paid for by sales commissions. If you effectively outlaw sales commissions, then that's just going to push the cost up-front instead, and the poor moochers are going to get even more butthurt over that.

So, no