"After over a decade of trying, it may be that Red Hat has finally found a way to shut down the RHEL rebuild aftermarket."
The problem is that this can be written:
"After over a decade of trying, it may be that Red Hat has finally found a way to shut down the open source right to redistribute source, modified or unmodified"
and
" It never was under any obligation to provide ready-packaged source code in a form that made it easy for competitors to construct identical copies. That is not what the GPL – or any other FOSS license – was ever about."
Correct. The GPL was not about that. The GPL is about mutual co-operation not competition. The best and most successful open source products are ones where one contributor is ok with the fact that the contribution benefits a competitor, because the GPL means it goes back the other way. This works when the open source code is not anyone's actual product, but an enabler of added value. Clearly, Red Hat now thinks that open source is harmful to its business model because the source code is the product. For all the talk of "services", they now see themselves selling licensed source code. This is not a business model which works with open source (well, until this legal hack). Mongo DB and Elasticsearch solved the problem be deactivating the open source licensing. They could, because those companies had copyright in most of the code, and CLAs for the rest allowing relicensing. Red Hat can't do that because it has copyright to almost none of RHEL.
The GPL is about the freedom to modify and redistribute source. RHEL is noe only nominally compliant with this. If people had known that this was the deal with RHEL before they committed to it, that's one kettle of fish. But Red Hat has pulled basically a relicensing trick. It's not very nice. This is enterprise software with long life cycles, they should have dated this to take effect at the next release. I think it is against the spirit of free software, and I think it is a bit unethical. I hope Red Hat takes a big reputational hit for this.