If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
That model just does not work. For the engineering that goes into RedHat (and all the contributions back to the community they send), they just don’t make enough for that to happen. Everyone just wants to shrug this off as “Oh IBM has lots of money so that’s not a problem”. This “make it free and charge for support” model almost never works for FOSS yet so many people want to believe it does. On an enterprise level, it just doesn’t. People who want to use an enterprise distro of Linux for free also likely don’t want to pay for support either, instead wanting to support it themselves. Which is all well and good but that doesn’t account for the fact RHEL does all the engineering, all the building, all the testing, everything, and then puts that release up for use. All of that has to be covered somehow.
There was never any promise that you’d always be able to create a “bug compatible distro”. Ever. The GPL does not cover future releases or updates and never has, and even implying that it should sets a dangerous precedent of people being entitled to what you haven’t even created yet.
Rather than hearing the emotional takes from people that want to turn this into “RedHat vs the Linux Community”, I strongly suggest you listen to LinuxUnplugged: linuxunplugged.com/517?t=506.
RedHat is still contributing everything upstream, and CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. You have full access to the source of whatever you buy.
The only thing that has changed here is that the loophole that Alma and Rocky were using to create a RHEL clone and then offer support for it (Which is literally RedHat’s own business model) is gone. Those two are throwing a tantrum because they got to set up a nice easy business model where they literally did nothing more than clone RHEL and then offer support for it and that free lunch is over. That’s it. They don’t contribute back to RHEL, they don’t do anything to help development. They sold themselves as the “free” or “cheaper” alternative and now they’re getting burned for building their entire business of the work done by RHEL.
Everything else in this story is noise, drama, and unnecessary emotion.