Pretty much all RedHat employees I read from seemed absolutely hell-bent on misunderstanding the purpose of most downstream distros. They all acted like Alma/Rocky, etc were aiming to be kinda-sorta similar to RHEL, when in theory those distributions have to be as 100% identical to RHEL as possible to be useful.
Depending on how things play out, the situation for the future can range from “Downstream distros just have to create a free RHEL account to get the source like always” to a ruinous game of cat and mouse where RedHat moves things around, keeps back tiny pieces and generally makes any kind of stable automation of a build process close to impossible. Things can also start out at the harmless end of the range and get progressively worse until all downstream distros just (have to) give up. This uncertainty is poison for them, even if RHEL does nothing further to harm them.
All in all I’m very glad I reduced my usage of the whole RHEL ecosystem by a lot since they killed CentOS. I’ll continue to move away from it until all that is left is a single node in a corner used to support those of our customers who can’t be steered away from it. We stopped recommending RHEL to our customers already and this kind of stunt just shows what a good decision that was.
Self-answering after a lot of reading:
Pretty much all RedHat employees I read from seemed absolutely hell-bent on misunderstanding the purpose of most downstream distros. They all acted like Alma/Rocky, etc were aiming to be kinda-sorta similar to RHEL, when in theory those distributions have to be as 100% identical to RHEL as possible to be useful.
Depending on how things play out, the situation for the future can range from “Downstream distros just have to create a free RHEL account to get the source like always” to a ruinous game of cat and mouse where RedHat moves things around, keeps back tiny pieces and generally makes any kind of stable automation of a build process close to impossible. Things can also start out at the harmless end of the range and get progressively worse until all downstream distros just (have to) give up. This uncertainty is poison for them, even if RHEL does nothing further to harm them.
All in all I’m very glad I reduced my usage of the whole RHEL ecosystem by a lot since they killed CentOS. I’ll continue to move away from it until all that is left is a single node in a corner used to support those of our customers who can’t be steered away from it. We stopped recommending RHEL to our customers already and this kind of stunt just shows what a good decision that was.