Ok for clarification the subscription is a subscription for support not the software per the terms of the GPL license.

In no way is Red Hat required to provide BINARY RPM's SRPM's ‎or even the spec files to generate RPM, however in the past they did. Now they still provide the patches and spec files but they don package them for you because that is part of the "support" you get with the subscription and the GPL and the GNU manifesto clearly states that they are not only allowed to do this but in fact this was a recommended business model for free speech software since long before the Linux kernel was created.

Red hat is doing nothing wrong and reality has a long standing history of going above and beyond what they are required to do for the community‎. 

By the way the Pre RHEL version of Red Hat still exists they just renamed it Fedora and stopped charging for box sets because once people started getting DSL lines and CD/DVD burners it didn't make sence to still attempt to put it in a pretty box in a retail store and charge $90 for a bunch of CD's you could have downloaded over your 28.8k modem if you were willing to tie up a phone line for a few days.


Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
  Original Message  
From: Tom H
Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 12:18
To: SL Users
Subject: Re: Docker

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 6:25 PM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 02/02/2015 11:35 AM, Connie Sieh wrote:
>> On Fri, 30 Jan 2015, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>>
>>> Presumably, any application that will run under CentOS, in particular,
>>> CentOS 7 that is the RHEL source release for other ports, such as SL 7,
>>> should be able to run under SL. My understanding is that SL 7 is not
>>> built from the actual RHEL 7 source that is used to build RHEL 7 that is
>>> licensed for fee, but from the RHEL packaged CentOS source (CentOS now
>>> effectively being a unit of Red Hat, a for-profit corporation) that is
>>> used to build CentOS 7 (that, as with SL 7, is licensed for free as a
>>> binary installable executable system that requires no building from
>>> source per se).
>>
>> SL is built from the source that Red Hat has provided. It is built from
>> the same source that all rebuilds can build from. There is no such thing as
>> "RHEL packaged CentOS source" .
>
> Please correct me if I am in error. RHEL, binary licensed for fee, is built
> from a source that RH does not seem to release. Rather, RH releases,
> through the RH subsidiary CentOS and a GIT mechanism, a source for all
> rebuilds, supposedly including CentOS. Thus, SL and CentOS are built from
> the same source, but the actual RHEL source may or not may in fact (claims
> to the contrary notwithstanding) be the same, as no one outside of RH or a
> RH licensee actually sees the source for RHEL. If RHEL also is built
> through a GIT mechanism, I am assuming that the Internet path to the RHEL
> GIT is not the same as that to the "public" rebuildable CentOS GIT. In the
> event that Fermilab or CERN has licensed the actual RHEL 7 source as a RHEL
> licensee, would personnel at either non-RH entity be allowed to comment if
> in fact there were non-trivial differences between the actual RHEL 7 source
> and the "rebuildable" CentOS 7 source? Trivial differences would be the
> presence of RH logos and splash screens, each of which is replaced by
> whatever the rebuilder is using (SL for the SL rebuild) -- but all of the
> internal intellectual property references in the source code still
> (presumably) mentions RH in both the actual RHEL 7 source and the CentOS 7
> rebuildable source.

1) RH doesn't license RHEL; it provides subscriptions to RHEL. The
individual have licenses...

2) What might be the rationale for RH to release SRPMs (as SRPMs
previously and as a git tree now) that are different from the SRPMs
from which it builds RHEL?!

3) The RPMs that are distributed by SL and CentOS are sometimes
different from the RPMs that are distributed by RH because, for
example, RH might use brpackage-x.y-1.el7 to satisfy
package-i.j-k.el7's BuildRequires but might only release
brpackage-x.y-2.el7. So SL and CentOS have to use the latter to build
package-i.j-k.el7's.