Red Hat might have the legal right to gate their product, but it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who knows how many people that publish it for free and then to put road blocks around their derivative.
I don't really like reductionist blaming, but I feel basically forced to wonder what Red Hat would be doing if IBM wasn't involved.
I'm always curious that people get angry at Red Hat profiting on the work of others, but few people get angry at the companies that use a RHEL clone to run their business and pay nothing and contribute nothing.
Red Hat is still releasing source code. The only thing that it's not doing is making it super-convenient to rebuild exactly its product.
Seriously - for most purposes CentOS Stream is just fine if what you want is a distro that feels like RHEL. Its one drawback is that it's not a one-for-one clone of RHEL, which generally only really matters if you are using it to run your business. Which gets me back to - why are people so pissed at Red Hat but not all the organizations that make money using RHEL but don't pay towards its development?
Releasing only to their customers and only if not redistributed. If you held redhat to the same standard for the open source they redistribute they couldn't exist.
CentOS wasn't selling support contracts tho.
Not that I think anything they are doing is in any way wrong mind you.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/c...
And I think an analogy is apt. Someone was one telling me that religions that are slightly different (think Protestantism versus Catholicism) lead to far greater strife than religions that are vastly different (like Buddhism and Catholicism.) Maybe people are just louder about the things they care about and feel close to.
RHEL Clones: Take finished source code, rebuild, test, release.
RHEL: Work upstream to develop features / submit features upstream before inclusion in RHEL, maintain specific versions of upstream, test hundreds of upstreams together to make sure they can be shipped together as an operating system, develop "glue" software like Anaconda to install + manage the whole thing, take source, build, test, release, accept bugs, start over again for next minor release or major release as needed.
And, of course, this elides all the certification work that makes RHEL an attractive enough project to rebuild in the first place because people want very specifically a RHEL compatible distribution to run an application or applications on top of.
What people get pissed at Red Hat about isn't that they don't get to access the source. They're pissed they don't get the convenience. Largely speaking, the people who get pissed aren't concerned about Free Software, either - they just want easy to run binaries. As I understand it "get binaries for free" is not mandated by the four freedoms. The source code is still out there for people to study, change, use, and redistribute. That seems entirely compatible with the free software ethos - but incompatible with the freeloader ethos.