The open source community was upset after Red Hat announced last week that they would begin restricting access to Red Hat Enterprise sources by placing them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal, and public distribution of the sources would be limited to of CentOS Stream.
This in turn causes problems for free derivative distributions such as SoulLinux that cannot proceed.
Red Hat issued a blog post today attempting to address some of the criticism.
The Red Hat blog featured a post by Mike McGrath, Red Hat's VP of Core Platforms Engineering. The post talks about Red Hat's "commitment to open source."
“Despite what is currently being said about Red Hat, we are making our hard work easily accessible to non-customers. Red Hat uses and always will use an open source development model. When we find a bug or write a new feature, we share our code. This benefits everyone in the community, not just Red Hat and our customers.
We will always share our code and adhere to the open source licenses our products use, which include the GPL. When I say we adhere to the open source licenses that apply to our code, I mean it.
I feel like a lot of the anger at our recent decision comes from either those who don't want to pay for the time, effort, and resources put into RHEL, or those who want to repackage our work for their own profit. . This requirement for RHEL code is disingenuous.
Simply refactoring code without adding meaningful changes in any way is a real threat to open source companies everywhere. It's a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to turn open source back into an activity exclusively for hobbyists and hackers."
Read the entire post at Red Hat blog.
