They weren't dying before, but they be might now.

The problem is that the value RHEL provides. For my PERSONAL projects the value is less than the cost of renewing my free license every year from them. For a company shipping a system that will in the field for a decade with minimal updates is completely that must work with minimal downtime the value they are providing is higher than what they charge.

That difference in value by users requires RedHat to balance costs the they can charge against maximizing numbers of users versus income. The catch they are running into is some people they provide little value to will just leave, but those people were providing a lot of value for customers. 100 or so ansible roles that your customers were using is suddenly no longer going to be supported, and eventually likely not to work. That is likely a net negative for value provided to customers and goes against the spirit of open source.

The people using Rocky or Alma are unlikely to see cost of RHEL being worth it. So they will go elsewhere. But having a bigger number of users running on those systems provided value and network effect for RedHat even though they are not paying. That indirect benefit is now lost.

RedHat obviously feels all of that does not provide enough value to justify the cost of possible lost sales. I think they are wrong, but maybe they are right.

Maybe they are violating the GPL which explicitly says you cannot add limitations for users sharing code. From here it sure looks questionable at best, intentionally breaking the license at worst. That will have to be left for someone else to decide.

Well, the alternative is competing based on what you are actually selling in this model: Support for this product. If I can clone your distro and do better at supporting it than YOU do or at least good enough to sell my support, then you have a situation of possibilities:

• Your support sucks
• You're charging too much or don't have the right market / price options available
• Your support in general is not really necessary, and thus your business model is weak in the first place. Another way of saying this one is that you aren't offering anying particularly unique for new features on top of what's already freely available to sweeten the deal beyond selling support.
• You've done other things to your customers to weaken your relationships, and thus income flow

Locking out those "second run" vendors who are riding your coat tails is going to be a self-defeating path, however you slice it. Oracle has deep pockets - they are unlikely to sit back on this one as an example problem. The bigger problem is violation of the spirit of the GPL which alienates devs. You're correct that they may only be inconvenienced, but inconveniencing any developer is a first class ticket to them working around your shenanigans or just opting out of supporting your platform in general. I already know 2 vendors in my small world who are subtly indicating support for RHEL and CentOS is being considered with some pushes on their customers to consider other distros. That's in the last few days!

Anyway, they are throwing out the good will they have left with the bathwater of trying to short circuit low-bar competitors because they want to squeeze profit. You may not be wrong to stand by them, but I'm taking my support (and business) elsewhere as a result of their stance. A recent post looks like they are doubling down on the message.