Wow, that’s a weird take. The host brings up several points on the other side too, and the Red Hat employee even acknowledges some shortcomings, but all you really heard was “RedHat good everyone else bad” when you listened to that?
I mean, you want multiple perspectives, you need to include someone who has a stake in both. The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side, does it not make sense to bring in someone from RedHat? Why are they automatically just “company yes men”?
How can you ever have any kind of nuance or understanding of the other side if you just view it black and white like that? I’ve read and understood the claims from people that are upset with Red Hat, and I kind of get it, but I also think these people don’t really understand the value of what it is they’re using. Under-appreciating what you get for “free” is a very, very common sentiment among FOSS users (and I’m no exception, I’m sure I’m guilty of it too). But the facts here are simple; no one is really “losing” anything here except Rocky and Alma, and they should not have built their business model on basically taking de-branded RHEL and selling support for it directly.
Like I said, Fedora is not going anywhere, CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. If you are a Red Hat customer, the source code of whatever you run is always fully available. There is literally nothing being lost by anyone except those who wanted to use Rocky/Alma as a perfect 1:1 clone of RHEL without contributing a single penny back to RedHat. Yet somehow, the narrative has been changed into “Redhat is being evil and violating the spirit of open source and blah blah blah” and somehow, conveniently, no one has noticed that all of the narrative seems to only benefit/support Rocky and Alma? No one finds that the least bit suspicious?
Whether or not RedHat is going to suddenly claw back a bunch of business from all these people that were using “free” RHEL, that I highly doubt. As far as a move to try to regain perceived losses, I doubt RedHat is going to have any success with that, if that’s their intention. But see, I can have the opinion that they’re removing loopholes for competitors who add absolutely nothing (whether monetary or code contributions) but take and “resell”, and I can also have the opinion that it’s probably not going to change the bottom line much because people who were used to getting “RHEL” for “free” aren’t going to start paying for RHEL, they’re just going to go elsewhere.