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Preparing to move from Ubuntu to Fedora
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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It's basically the opposite. Fedora is the community based upstream, and some of it reaches RHEL, but Fedora isn't Red Hat.
What Red Hat did was limit who they distribute the source code to to paid customers, and add provisions to their TOS to give them the right to end their paid contract with you if you redistribute it. You aren't prevented from doing so, but choosing to do so prevents you from getting future versions, which you were only entitled to through said contract. They also still open-source to CentOS Stream, just upstream of RHEL.
Now, do I think it was a good move by RH, no. Was it legal, probably, yes, but IANAL, eventual courts will tell. Did it go against the "spirit" of the GPL, maybe, yes. But is RHEL closed-source? No, it's objectively not. Please, don't spread misinformation.
Misinformation my ass
Read. Then read again. Then read again until you get it.
From gnu.org "What is free software?"
“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
As you can see Free Software (and the GPL) says that the end user has the right to FREELY USE AND REDISTRIBUTE the software, AS IS.
In other words, I could get a copy of RHEL and without making a single change, could redistribute it or even sell it.
Yet Red Hat calls this "freeloading". Yet that is PRECISELY what Free Software is about!
Rocky Linux, Alma Linux etc were well within their rights to rebrand and redistribute RHEL bug for bug to others. Red Hat had no right to shut them out. Yes they could have made them a customer and charged them for it, but they didn't do that. And if I'm not mistaken they made the binaries available, not the source code. Meaning that Rocky and Alma would need to spend weeks compiling the code before they could even make it ready for distribution.
Now, someone could become a client of Red Hat, get the code and then host it on a server for anyone to download. But I have a feeling Red Hat would drop them as soon as they found out.
Basically RH now have a closed source mentality.
As for Fedora, stop being so naive. Were you born yesterday? I'm an IT Pro and I can tell your if my company set up a working group full of full time employees to work on a "community" distro which then gets directly absorbed into it company and used in our enterprise products, that working group is to all intents and purposes a part of my company since I'm freaking paying their salaries, and they are working on my freaking product!