Because Wine often needs to run .Net applications and Mono is the easiest way for them to do that.

they were already maintaining a fork of Mono for quite some time. This seems to me like a ceremonial torch passing to make them the ‘official’ owner of the project.

while you might be right some things are more important. why is your comment not directed to people actively blocking these changes? why not just agree to them and move on with these “more important things”. the PR was submitted. the effort had been done already. blocking it is an statement on its own.

some contributor agreement does force people to surrender their copyright. MongoDB is probably the most infamous example.

I had the same though. No way they would choose that wording otherwise. they will probably just make it available, also make people who contribute sign their copyright away.

that is the gist, yes. they are only providing RHEL sources to their clients (which is OK by the GPL), but then if their client decide to exercise their right to redistribute those sources (which the GPL allows them), RH will then cut them from their services (and any future sources).

They argument is “no one can force us to be in business with anyone” (i.e. go exercise your distribution right somewhere else), others argue that his is adding further restrictions into the distribution.

In any case this is not a clear case for any argument and it would need to be decided by trial, but IMHO it is at least against the spirit of the GPL.

You seem to be up in arms about it so go contact SFLC/FSF or some lawyer who will take the case.

I love this comment because most of the conversation revolves around the fact that RH might be violating the GPL but can do it because most people cannot simply afford to go against them.

it is not enough to point to a repo where you can find the whole history. by the GPL terms you need to provide the exact sources of the software you distribute. As an example: Apple here lists all the GPL software they distribute with links to the exact versions they use to ship them https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ This is what redhat is not doing anymore.

from their subscription terms (I don’t manage to get the exact link on my phone due to their weird site. click on the links for the agreements in the bottom ) https://sso.redhat.com/auth/realms/redhat-external/protocol/openid-connect/registrations

If you use the Individual Developer Subscriptions for any other purposes or beyond the parameters described in these Program Terms, you are in violation of Red Hat’s Enterprise Agreement and are required to pay the Subscription fees that would apply to such use, in addition to any and all other remedies available to Red Hat under applicable law. Examples of such violations include, but are not limited to,

● using the Red Hat Subscription Services for Individual Development Use and/or Individual Production Use on more than sixteen (16) Physical or Virtual Nodes, or

● selling, distributing and/or rebranding the Red Hat Subscription Services (or any part thereof) contained in the Individual Developer Subscriptions.>>

what they put in their gitlab is besides the point. The issue here is they are forbidding other people from redistributing the sources they got from Red Hat, which is allowed by the GPL. They know they cannot legally stop people from doing so, so instead they have decided they will terminate contracts with those people.

In the view of many, this is “imposing further restrictions”, and thus breaking the GPL.

Respecting a license is a choice.

what? no! licenses are how authors are deciding to grant specific permissions on their copyright.

that is like saying because you found a book in a library you have the choice to copy it and sell it.

the fact that source is available does not grant any permission besides looking at it.

I dont think it is only about this app. it is mostly about how the concept of Open Source has been redefined. Sometimes it feels like “source code is available” the same as Open Source (the code is there open, for you to see ,right?).

Linux. I think I started playing with it around 2001. I was a computer nerd on high school and I wanted to be a hacker. I would be lying if I said that The Matrix wasn’t a big factor. To this day I use black console with green text.