The two ways they have for getting source code are kind of funny and easy, and kind of makes fun of RHEL in pulling this maneuver, getting so much community backlash and ultimately having so little effect other than to negatively impact future business. But will they go further to violate the GPL? Or concede defeat? Say what you want, but to cut off paying customers if they share source code which is their right under the GPL is a really bad move that exposes the character of those running the company.
Yes, that’s totally fair, but a lot of people in the open source world, especially individual contributor, will only support an open-source product based on how many goodwill the backing company provides. Red Hat, before the IBM acquisition, is on the top of the list due to their enormous goodwill towards the open source community. Their willingness to support CentOS, which essentially making RHEL free and cutting into Red Hat’s revenue, created a lot of respect among Linux supporters, which in turns promoted usage of CentOS and RHEL and provides integration for CentOS/RHEL on their own open source projects. Red Hat became this big was partially due to the support and promotion from the Linux enthusiasts advocating their use in their companies.
The recent moves understandably made those people feel betrayed by Red Hat. Sure it’s within Red Hat’s right to do so, but in doing so, they burn a lot of goodwill and trust from their open source community.
I have since changed my overall view on this topic as others brought up their license’s verbiage that seems to be designed to threaten people into not rebuilding their source lest they lose access to their rightfully paid for license, but I’ll comment on this specific point.
Per RHEL, their metrics show that this:
was a nice idea, but not a reality for them. They didn’t see that turn around the way hobbyist and enthusiasts claim they did. Again, I’m not in support of all the decisions RHEL is making in regards to this, and I’m not saying we should blindly take their word for it. But they have addressed this particular point in saying “Yeah, we kinda thought that would happen too, but it didn’t.”
But that’s all kind of a moot point now, since their ToS is kind of damning.
“Would” happen? That’s literally what initially happened. They just hoped for something impossible.