1. The above market is pretty much "saturated" in the sense there aren't many proprietary UNIX systems left to convert to x86+RHEL. So not much growth potential there.
2. Oracle has their own RHEL rebuild that they aggressively(?) market to Oracle customers. And I guess it makes sense if you have a server to run Oracle DB on, to also use the Oracle RHEL rebuild to avoid the situation where you have a problem and Oracle and Redhat point fingers at each other and nobody takes charge of solving the issue.
3. Cloud. Cloud is obviously big these days, and it seems for one or another reason cloud deployments often choose some other distro than RHEL, be it one of the free rebuilds (CentOS, Alma, Rocky, OEL), or something else entirely like Ubuntu.
While I'm not privy to any RH internal info, it wouldn't surprise me if they're worried about the above trends continuing. Whether this recent change to make life for rebuilds a bit harder will materially affect anything, and if so how, remains to be seen.
(I have no personal experience trying to run anything like this, this is purely citing a previous comment made.)
Non-RHEL hosts are only supported is Red Hat has someone to talk to at the vendor or cloud provider, so that they can debug stuff that breaks only in their environment and can't be reproduced. This is done to cannot guarantee the level of support that customers expect but very few cloud provider can provide that. I am not even sure that IBM's cloud made the short list.
On other unsupported hosts we will ask the customer to reproduce on a supported host if we think the host is the culprit.
Probably not https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/certified-cloud-and-servi...
Best damn business innovation ever, renting people shovels to dig themselves a hole with!
We had Oracle databases running on Oracle Solaris running on Oracle SPARC servers, because the bosses were convinced of the synergies. When the problems started (with Solaris zone clusters) it was a happy merry-go-round of fingerpointing between Oracle support groups.
Oracle is on a rather short list of companies I'll try to avoid doing business with if at all possible.
What Red Hat is doing now will probably increase their license sales in the short term. But they will do so by cannibalizing the entire Red Hat-compatible ecosystem. All the "freeloaders" provide RHEL with most of its share in the distro market. Kill them off and it will become a technical backwater, all the small and medium users will go somewhere else and there will be no on-ramp for new customers (as Red Hat is too technically different from what they have). It can take a while, they might get RHEL for their old systems but they'll go SUSE/Debian/Ubuntu for new stuff.
I'd say that they are literally doing what Travis CI and other companies have done in the past, they have no vision of growing their market anymore, now its all about cost cutting and squeezing the most out of their existing share while the music is playing. So no, I'm not angry about it, but on the other hand I can't see it as anything but a sign of irreversible decline.