this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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To my knowledge, they did not violate the GPL. The sources are still available. They just don’t organize it in a way that it’s easy to build an exact clone of RHEL. If you want that, you have to have a RHEL subscription.
SUSE is going in a similar direction and not getting much heat. Leap is apparently going away in favor of Slowroll, which is similar to CentOS. If you want stable, you have to pay. Meanwhile, they are taking shots at Red Hat and throwing a little money at making a RHEL clone.
SUSE doesn’t build openSUSE or control its direction (they have influence, but not in the same way). Leap had been planned to move to ALP, which looks like the future of SUSE Enterprise. If they changed that plan it is likely due to resources, ALP is primary focused at servers I believe. If they decide to go with only Slowroll and Tumbleweed is a community decision, and it appears the polling about it has been done within the community not dictated.
I think it is very likely openSUSE will have a vanilla ALP distro of some sort as well, without adding bunch of extras to it that add maintenance burden. Just like they do with Micro OS and the other alternatives that aren’t really viable for desktop.
Edit: to the last piece, the actual email about the survey mentions a 1:1 with ALP, so if somebody wanted “SUSE Stable” that is probably what they should look for.
It seems more like where SUSE is going and where openSUSE as a distribution wants to go are different directions, that’s very little in common with the Red Hat / CentOS / Code issue.
I thought the reasoning why it's legal is that RHEL only gets distributed to people who sign a contract which forbids redistribution: So while the GPL gives them the right to distribute, the contract takes precedence and they are unable to share the code
I think they really nitpick it, to where it may not violate it directly but violates the spirit. If you redistribute they’ll cancel your subscription. You “can” do it.
They have a eula that prohibits redistribution of software that is licensed under the GPL, so they violate it. The excuse is that you can get those packages from other sources, but that doesn't change the above.