EmbeddedEntropy, 8 months ago

Again, less than half of RHEL is even software released under the GPL.

I would be completely shocked if this were true. I’m calling BS here.

I used to be my company’s primary contact for our Red Hat TAM for almost 13 years. Our TAMs were very proud to claim that all of RHEL was FOSS software, licensed under the GPL or sometimes other FOSS licenses.

I spun up a RHEL 9.2 instance and ran:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ sudo dnf list --all | wc -l
</span><span style="color:#323232;">6671
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ dnf info --all | grep "^License .*:.*GPL.*" | wc -l
</span><span style="color:#323232;">4344
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ python -c "print(4344/6673 * 100)"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">65.11767351221705
</span>

So 65% of RHEL 9’s packages are under a GPL license.

Much of the software that is GPL was authored by Red Hat themselves. According to the text of the GPL itself, Red Hat is not required to distribute the code to the totality of the RHEL distribution or even to more than half the code.

Half?!? Again, where are these mysterious numbers coming from?

It doesn’t matter if Red Hat authored those packages or not. What matters is if they were distributed under a GPL license. If you’re claiming that Red Hat multi-licensed those GPL’d packages that they exclusively wrote so they don’t have to comply with the GPL, please point those out to me (or at least a few), so I can check them out.