Red Hat:"Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription."
FSF: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its user"
However necessary Red Hat might consider this move to be, it is just as clearly a move away from the spirit of the GPL however much it may conform to the letter of the GPL.
At the same time, open source companies need to compete on some basis and hiding information seems to be one basis. Is there an alternative to this? (serious question)
You have all of the freedom to change the code that you always had. The code is exactly the same, but instead of being released in small chunks, it's released in one big tarball. The commit splitting and commit messages could be considered documentation, they are not part of the code and not covered by any license.
The "Spirit" of the GPL argument has never rung true with me. It's not about creating shared projects and having big hippie hacker sit-ins. It's about keeping CODE free.
This is a perfectly legitimate move by Redhat. It's unfortunate that they felt they needed to do this, but they are under no obligation to provide source code to anyone other than those to whom they distribute, and the GPL certainly doesn't force them to support anyone at all - they want to support paying customers.
It's not a move away from the spirit of the GPL in any way.
FSF: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its user"
However necessary Red Hat might consider this move to be, it is just as clearly a move away from the spirit of the GPL however much it may conform to the letter of the GPL.
At the same time, open source companies need to compete on some basis and hiding information seems to be one basis. Is there an alternative to this? (serious question)