They run a cloud VM with a paid RHEL AMI and use it to pull the sources. :-).

How long until this work-around is "patched" by RH/IBM?

This is a big part of the reason there's so much uncertainty in the RHEL community right now...

They would need to stop providing sources to all of their clients using rhel in cloud.. doesn't seem possible

Could they not change their contract/license and forbid "exporting" or something?

IBM is big enough to make an example out of a few unlucky individuals, and compel everyone else to play their way.

RH/IBM is bound by a contract where the moment someone spins up one of their VMs, they MUST provide all sources and the recipient is free to redistribute them.

If they forbid this they lose the right to use Linux.

It doesn't work that way, in reality.

Not anyone can just bring a suit to compel compliance - and IBM has much deeper pockets anyway. So even if the suit was righteous, it would be dead and buried long before it saw a court room.

Additionally, the Kernel is only a tiny portion of the RHEL distribution. There's plenty of proprietary RH/IBM code in RHEL, and a ton of non-GPL'ed software too.

Lastly, a RHEL license contract might be updated to explicitly state you are forbidden from distributing RH sources... which would kill Rocky's "work-around" while still being GPL compatible.

GPL isn't some magic bullet like some people believe...

> Not anyone can just bring a suit to compel compliance - and IBM has much deeper pockets anyway. So even if the suit was righteous, it would be dead and buried long before it saw a court room.

Unless it's Oracle that sues them.

> Could they not change their contract/license and forbid "exporting" or something?

Even the people who don't think what they already did was a GPL violation would consider that to be one.

And they can't do that without some customer ban list for AMIs

Is this true? How is this compatible with what other posters are asserting -- that the issue at hand is that Redhat will kill your contract if you start distributing the sources?

When you launch a cloud RHEL VM you don't really have a contract with Red Hat; you have to "agree" to their EULA or whatever, but I don't know if there is any way for AWS to cut off a customer from accessing RHEL. In theory Red Hat could ask AWS to kill your whole AWS account, but would AWS do that?

And anyway even if AWS were to shut your account I guess you'd just need another volunteer to spin another AWS VM to start all over again...