Red Hat's Mike McGrath, the company's vice-president of Core Platforms Engineering, has chosen to go down this route, after the announcement that the company would be further curbing access to the source code for its enterprise Linux distribution went down like a lead balloon and resulted in blowback from the industry.

In Monday's post, which is much longer than the one in which he announced the restrictions, McGrath attempts to solicit sympathy for all the work that Red Hat does. "Maintaining and supporting an operating system for 10 years is a Herculean task – there's enormous value in the work we do," are some of his words. No mention there that all those who work at this firm draw good salaries.

It appears that some who use Red Hat's code have called McGrath names. "We’ve been called evil; I was called an IBM exec who was installed to turn Red Hat closed source — and that’s only the 'nice' stuff," he writes. "So let’s clear things up."

Unfortunately for McGrath, the curbs he announced are very real; the reaction may be couched in civil or uncivil terms, but one cannot get away from the fact: from now on, gaining access to the RHEL source code will be that much more difficult.

McGrath's plaint about "the hours and late nights we spend backporting a patch to code that is now 5 to 10 years old or older" really doesn't wash if one strips away the verbiage and looks at the cold, hard facts.

His most strident words about the blowback are these: "I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous."

McGrath conveniently forgets a few realities. First, those who created CentOS — a distribution that stripped the trademarks from RHEL and made the code available free — were not doing anything nefarious. The open source licences that govern RHEL code allow that.

And any other distributions that have sprung up in the wake of Red Hat's changes in December 2020, when it killed off CentOS, are also following all open-source licensing to the letter. Nobody is violating any licence.

McGrath did not deal with what I believe to be the actual reason for this change: the gradual decrease in revenue from its operations. As I pointed out, "The change [announced on Friday] could have something to do with the revenue which Red Hat's owner, IBM, has been reporting for Red Hat. In the first quarter of 2023, the company reported an 8% rise in revenue; for the previous four quarters it was 18%, 12%, 12% and 10% respectively."

For those who do not follow developments around open source, IBM bought Red Hat in 2019.

McGrath appears to be more interested in justifying what the company has done: "Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make."

Commenting on the move to restrict access to the RHEL source code, well-known free software and open source developer Russell Coker said: "I believe this [IBM's action] violates the spirit of the GPL, but IBM has good lawyers so I'm sure it's legal."

Russell, who has contributed code to the NSA's SE Linux project in the past, added: "I also don't believe this is a good business decision for IBM. Having people like me use the same code as RHEL and provide quality bug reports would be in IBM's best interests."

McGrath appears to waffle over the differences between the CentOS Stream — which is the stream that will now allow access to outsiders — and RHEL. The fact is that CentOS Stream will never be the same as RHEL; only for a brief while will the source be the same and that will be after an RHEL release.

"Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere," McGrath writes. "This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity."

This is laughable; it is the so-called hackers — those who get their hands dirty with code — who built open source into what is today. Not the suits who parade around at conferences in shiny suits with Tux lapel pins.

It is notable that McGrath makes no mention of Fedora, the community Linux distribution that Red Hat supports. This is used by many former Red Hat users, but from now on will be upstream of CentOS Stream. This means it will be even less likely to have the latest packages and bug fixes. But then who cares for ordinary users anymore?

Linux, no matter the distribution, has come to be what it is because of users. I can speak with confidence, having been a user for nearly 23 years – though my distribution of choice has always been, and will continue to be, Debian.

Anyone and everyone is welcome to use open-source software to make money. Companies and individuals can say so openly and nobody will disagree. Subterfuge, however, only invites scorn.