I'm unsure what the benefit to Red Hat is in this case. All a competitor need do is become a "customer" by buying a copy of RHEL 6, and then Red Hat is compelled by the GPL to distribute all of their patches to that "customer". Seems like more of a PR gaffe to me, than an effective countermeasure against the competition gaining access to their code.
I think you're unclear on what is not being shared. From what I understand, old version of RHEL had a vanilla kernel, and then an RPM with RH patches to that kernel, as well as the documentation for those patches. New versions of RHEL will not have a vanilla kernel; it will only contain a kernel with their patches pre-applied. Documentation for those patches will only be available to subscribers.
The code is not being treated as the commodity, but the documentation for that code.
So, corporations with deep pockets (read Oracle) can buy the subscription through a proxy and have full access to the individual patches and full documentation. The rest of us independent and poor hackers cannot afford it and we suffer.
Yeah, good idea RedHat.
And yes, I know the GPL does not compel them to be nice.
I think this was discussed on LWN; if you get the patches from Red Hat and redistribute them, Red Hat will cancel your service contract. So it could work, but only once.
That has been going on forever. I remember the days when Red Hat was shipping a "2.4" kernel that had all the features from 2.6 backported into it. They're still submitting the patches upstream, so if you want an "unobfuscated" kernel tree you can get it from Linus.
I have heard but not validated that RH contracts have a clause that if you ask for the source, they give it to you and then promptly cut your support contract.
