Red Hat is probably the biggest single provider of GPL software in the world. They consistently choose the GPL for software they author and release. They founded and fund the Fedora Project themselves explicitly to be a community driven distro independent of their commercial efforts. They provide the full source to their products even though a huge percentage of the code is MIT, BSD, or Apache and does not require them to. They provide everything required to produce the "aggregate" full product even though the GPL does not require them to.
I will go on record now with the prediction that, if uutils catches on, Red Hat will be one of the last companies to move away from GNU. They are probably the largest contributor to glibc and GCC.
What evidence do you have that they would have "preferred not to provide source at all"? Because their is a mountain of evidence otherwise.
As an individual user, Red Hat will give you a free license to their flagship product. Then they will tell you how to download every line of code for it. I don't have a license. I do not use Red Hat (other than occasionally using the also totally free RHEL9 container).
"Remember when Red Hat tried to lock away the source code to subscribers only?"
I do not remember them changing the policy you are talking about. If you think they did, it highlights how overblown the response was at the time. The biggest impact of the Red Hat change is that Alma Linux is now a better project that can actually innovate and contribute.
Red hat provided the source to their kernel with the letter but not the spirit of the law, to impeed Oracle Linux. We'd (Ksplice) get the changes from Redhat version to version as one giant patch file, with all the changes mixed together. There's no chance in hell their internal kernel developers worked that way, but the source was there, so the letter of the GPL was satisfied.
The other thing they did was close the source repos. First you had to be a subscriber to get the binaries, and thus by the GPL, you could get the source. However, if you shared that source code with anyone else and they caught you, they wouldn't let you renew your license the next year, so you couldn't get the newer version, binaries OR source. This also isn't technically against the rules of the GPL, but it's hard to see that as being in line with the spirit of it.
It's hard to see Redhat as the benevolent GPL open source hug supplier with real world business practices like that. Not that I fault them for it, it's just business.
Again, be careful not to attribute past RH actions with IBM. Yes, IBM was very helpful in the 90s and later, but you can't fully trust a corporation past the next financial statement, and certainly not past a leadership change or three.
Did I miss Red Hat applying the license of their software with the rights given to them by said license? No, I did not, I supported it. The GPL is perfectly compatible with commerce and a profitable business model and this example shows exactly why. What would you prefer–companies that open source software bleed money and get taken advantage of by others? I don't. I want to see a healthy open source ecosystem that preserves user freedoms while balancing that with profitability. The GPL perfectly embodies this ideal.
As he says, it's just business. And IBM isn't near the top on my list of big tech companies to avoid. However they are subject to the same enshittification pressures as the rest. Their history is not all rosy either.
I will go on record now with the prediction that, if uutils catches on, Red Hat will be one of the last companies to move away from GNU. They are probably the largest contributor to glibc and GCC.
What evidence do you have that they would have "preferred not to provide source at all"? Because their is a mountain of evidence otherwise.
As an individual user, Red Hat will give you a free license to their flagship product. Then they will tell you how to download every line of code for it. I don't have a license. I do not use Red Hat (other than occasionally using the also totally free RHEL9 container).
"Remember when Red Hat tried to lock away the source code to subscribers only?"
I do not remember them changing the policy you are talking about. If you think they did, it highlights how overblown the response was at the time. The biggest impact of the Red Hat change is that Alma Linux is now a better project that can actually innovate and contribute.