Thank you for your impressions and (partial) clarification on the 
license source availability requirement situation.

Given that:

  AL, Rocky, and all other IBM RHEL clones depend upon IBM RH to release 
buildable source (that is source code and the tools required to build 
that source to an executable installed distro), and that

  none of these entities seem to have the resources to develop "from 
scratch" a "new" enterprise Linux,

it seems that all EL users, including those who are using 
built-from-RHEL-source clones, are at the mercy of IBM RH, that is, IBM.

If IBM decides to enforce IP control over what does not have to be 
released under the GPL, BSD, Linux, etc., licenses, one would not have a 
buildable "clone".  Am I correct?  Given the historical track record of 
IBM (now including IBM RH), one may not be long term optimistic if the 
continued release reduces IBM total "revenue" (the only real interest of 
IBM corporate business -- not research -- management).

My understanding is that Canonical is bound by Debian so long as Ubuntu 
is Debian based -- under Software in the Public Interest, a USA 
non-profit, that "controls" Debian -- to release buildable source. 
Debian is very unlikely to change the license.  If Canonical decided to 
"do an IBM RH", it would need to start a non-Debian derivative.  Is this 
correct?

Hence, for long(er) term stability in the availability of buildable 
source, amongst enterprise production distros, to my naive 
understanding, Ubuntu LTS has better prospects than any IBM RHEL clone.


On 4/5/21 7:52 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On 4/3/21 2:57 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
>> Is IBM RH required under the GPL and Linux licenses to release without 
>> charge the fully buildable source code for whatever Linux derivatives 
>> IBM RH provides under binary executable installable license for fee?
> The only source that has to be released at all is source covered by 
> licenses that require it.  There are many packages in the EL 
> distributions under licenses that do not require it.  I'm not going to 
> do all of the legwork for you on this, but a quick repoquery (found in 
> package "yum-utils"):
> 
> # repoquery --queryformat "%{license}"|sort|uniq|wc -l
> Last metadata expiration check: 0:48:27 ago on Mon 05 Apr 2021 09:19:33 
> AM EDT.
> 758
> #
> 
> Narrowing down the repositories to just the core ones (BaseOS, 
> AppStream, PowerTools), and just looking at the numbers of packages by 
> %{name}, using a simple grep for either the string GPL or the string BSD 
> in the %{license} tag:
> GPL: 4,191
> BSD: 1,285
> Total: 6,383
> Neither GPL nor BSD license: 1,608 (yes, that's more than expected, 
> because there are 701 packages where both the strings GPL and BSD are 
> found in the %{license} string; run:
> 
> repoquery --repo BaseOS --repo AppStream --repo PowerTools --queryformat 
> "%{license} %{name}"|grep BSD|grep GPL
> 
> to find out which ones).
> 
> Number of unique licenses in these repositories: 444 (302 are GPL or 
> similar, 118 are BSD or similar).
> 
>> ... Is there going to be a new ELC (Enterprise Linux Clone) list, ...
> 
> I would imagine each rebuild would have its own unique communications 
> channels, unless someone has the resources and is willing to put 
> together a combined list.
> 
>> Will EPEL, ElRepo, etc., continue to support AL8 with the various 
>> package, drivers, and utilities that base EL8 "lacks"? 
> 
> As of right now, both EPEL and ELrepo specifically support RHEL. CentOS 
> and other rebuild support from either is purely determined by how close 
> to RHEL the rebuild is.