I guess the GPL protects them from litigation here because users can still access the sources.

The new TOS pretty much states that if you “abuse” your RH subscription by repackaging their SRPMs and releasing them in the wild their lawyers will flay you in the town square.

Can IBM/Red Hat really lay claim to the modifications/patches they’ve made to open source packages? What about all of the contributions RH has made to the kernel over the years? Is that not “theirs” too?

In the software packaging world you see maintainers using freely available patches from Debian, Fedora, and so on for their own distros. So what happens now if a patch is only available through Red Hat? Is it reasonable to assume you’ll get sued because it came from one of their SRPM packages?

I just think it’s messed up. If this was limited to RH’s own software projects maybe I wouldn’t care, but making folks pay for access to what’s already free (and they didn’t write from scratch internally) is shitty. Unless I’m totally mistaken a lot of what ends up in CentOS and RHEL is derived from changes contributed to Fedora using the free labor/time/energy of everyday RPM maintainers.