A superficially modest blog post from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can’t publish it.
Another excerpt from the GPLv3 that explicitly describes and disallows what Red Hat is doing - you are explicitly not allowed to add any restrictions when you redistribute GPLv3 licensed software:
If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.…aaand an additional excerpt which disallows Red Hat’s restrictions:
Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License.(note: “original licensors” is not Red Hat regarding any software other than their own. Red Hat cannot change or infringe upon rights received from upstream.)
and ANOTHER excerpt:
If you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code.What if they technically allow redistribution, but terminate access to recieving updates for doing so? So you can distribute a copy of version N, but if you do so you will not recieve version N+1, and therefore will not be able to get source code for version N+1. Not sure if this is how it is in their contract though.
It could be argued that is also a restriction disallowed by the GPL (in my mind any terms that bring negative consequences for expressing your rights given by the license are restrictions), but at that point it’s really beyond my expertise on this subject. I’m not sure if the GPLv3 even defines this at all - maybe Red Hat is banking on that ambiguity.
They might also be banking on GPLv3 contributors being unable/unwilling to take them to court. The Linux kernel is GPLv2, and its contributors are probably more of a legal threat than anything else in RHEL.