Your talking about “restoring back what was lost” seems to be missing one key point: why was it lost, and why is it good to restore it?
It was lost because it meant a company, the company, the one who was investing the most in improving the ecosystem, found out that this model let other companies compete with them by offering support while freeloading on their efforts. That’s stealing in my world. Stealing in a perfectly legal way. That was OK, but was not good. They found out that, with the Stream model (which, BTW, offers more support timeframe than what whatever its competitors did) let them keep having a free solution for some people that might need/want it, while still keeping some of their competitive advantage.
And what’s more, they even accepted happily Alma’s decision to work with Stream as their upstream to build their own RHEL clone with the full 10 years of support and pushing for changes/patches that might be needed.
Notice I’m not saying if it’s OK to restore it. I’m not, because it’s perfectly legal. But it’s certainly not good. The RHEL ecosystem is in much better shape now, and what Alma did was fantastic and, IMO, the way to go.
Your talking about “restoring back what was lost” seems to be missing one key point: why was it lost, and why is it good to restore it? It was lost because it meant a company, the company, the one who was investing the most in improving the ecosystem, found out that this model let other companies compete with them by offering support while freeloading on their efforts. That’s stealing in my world. Stealing in a perfectly legal way. That was OK, but was not good. They found out that, with the Stream model (which, BTW, offers more support timeframe than what whatever its competitors did) let them keep having a free solution for some people that might need/want it, while still keeping some of their competitive advantage. And what’s more, they even accepted happily Alma’s decision to work with Stream as their upstream to build their own RHEL clone with the full 10 years of support and pushing for changes/patches that might be needed. Notice I’m not saying if it’s OK to restore it. I’m not, because it’s perfectly legal. But it’s certainly not good. The RHEL ecosystem is in much better shape now, and what Alma did was fantastic and, IMO, the way to go.