The two ways they have for getting source code are kind of funny and easy, and kind of makes fun of RHEL in pulling this maneuver, getting so much community backlash and ultimately having so little effect other than to negatively impact future business. But will they go further to violate the GPL? Or concede defeat? Say what you want, but to cut off paying customers if they share source code which is their right under the GPL is a really bad move that exposes the character of those running the company.
It is mentioned in the AlmaLinux post.
Rocky is planning on using the pay as you go cloud platforms to get around the enterprise agreements, those also do actually have a license (cloud providers have some language somewhere in the TOS that you have to abide by it), part of it includes: “Distributing the Subscription Services (or any portion) to a third party outside the Portal or using the Subscription Services to support a third party without paying the respective fees is a material breach of this Agreement even though the open source license applicable to individual software packages may give you the right to distribute those packages”.
I have no problem with them locking down sources to customers, that’s all they need to do. Their enterprise agreements and others have people concerned about those customer’s redistribution rights, it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
So the question becomes what is classified as a part of the “Subscription Services”? To what part of their products are they applying this part of the license? Because from what I can tell, and again I am not an expert by any means, RHEL’s message seems to be “the sources are still there, but we can’t keep doing your job for you.” The company put a lot of effort into making it exceptionally easy for rebuilders to do their rebuilds. It sounds to me like the goal is not to artificially increase the difficulty of rebuilding RHEL sources, but to just… Stop going out of their way to make it easier.