Hmm. Tough question.

Do you:

a. self-sterilise so that others may continue making money out of polluting the planet and thus making climate change worse

or:

b. have children and expect those who provide you with products that allow you to have children relatively easily to make money out of doing so in a manner that wont make climate change worse.

Tough choice, really. :/

There are two main points to what Red Hat did:

1. the GPL* only requires you to provide the source code if you acquire the product that is based on the source code
2. Red Hat can be picky about who its customers are

Thus what Red Hat did complies with the GPL (both 2 and 3). You have the right to the source code for the product you've acquired.

Point 2 is normality: I don't have to do business with you if I don't want to and just because I, at some point in the past, supplied you with a product based on GPLed code doesn't mean that I am now locked into having you as a customer forever.

In this case you get a yearly license to access RHEL. Whilst you are under that license you get the source code for RHEL and any updates to it. Once the license goes you retain the right to the source code you got but you get nothing new.

This is the way it works for (for example) Debian, also, except Debian is given away so the consequences of point 2 are not apparent. RHEL is a paid product so the consequences are, now, being made apparent.

This is the GPL working as intended. Remember what spawned it: RMS getting a bee in his bonnet when he found that he couldn't modify the firmware of a printer that was purchased as the software was closed.

I'm starting to think that no one has, actually, read the GPL because people are not reacting to it being violated but, rather, the violation of how it applies to (out of sheer convenience and sanity) free (as in beer) software. RHEL is not free (as in beer) software.

Blessed be the bee and its choice of bonnet.

* other licenses tend to be more liberal so all this works for them, also.

Red Hat can pick and choose who is their customer and who remains so. This means that they would drop them as a customer once they find out so they would have to keep on becoming a customer, buying RHEL each time.

From vague memory I believe that this bit is in RHEL's customer contract but it's not a strong memory so can't comment on in detail. There's, also, likely more to it to make it more painful.

They aren't. They're making it available to their customers.

They do. To the people they distribute the binaries to. Nothing in GPL2 or 3 requires one to make the source code available to everyone everywhere. Other licenses tend to be more liberal wrt distribution and thus are similarly complied with.