I think the alternative which the other commenter had in mind was simply providing desired SRPMS to customers reactively upon request, possibly with a nonzero charge to cover, rather than proactively providing them to all customers in bulk. The GPL certainly allows this, as opposed to a tarball and patches which you're right is inadequate.
Interesting wrinkle in the GPL's written offer option: the offer must be valid for "any third party", not only direct customers. But, it's certainly possible for the included written offer to reference an email address or website that is unique to each paying customer, such that valid request coming from a third party would be traceable to the intermediate paying customer whose support contract would then be canceled by Red Hat.
Does anyone know if Red Hat does this kind of watermarking of the GPL written offers, or if a licensee could share the offer anonymously, leak-style, and not get caught by the support contract people?
Interesting wrinkle in the GPL's written offer option: the offer must be valid for "any third party", not only direct customers. But, it's certainly possible for the included written offer to reference an email address or website that is unique to each paying customer, such that valid request coming from a third party would be traceable to the intermediate paying customer whose support contract would then be canceled by Red Hat.
Does anyone know if Red Hat does this kind of watermarking of the GPL written offers, or if a licensee could share the offer anonymously, leak-style, and not get caught by the support contract people?