Both Atlassian's "open core" and RHEL are free software.

The difference is that Atlassian sells plenty of proprietary software and add ons too, while the only proprietary software that Red Hat sells comes from recent acquisitions (e.g., Ansible Tower), and it is all in the process of becoming open source.

Red Hat has a great track record for open sourcing software from companies that they acquired.

>You can download it, inspect it, and run it... but you need a paid license to keep it running.

Then it is not open source. Open source has a strict definition, from the OSI.

the term Free software has nothing to do with Money. "Free speech, not Free Beer"

Redhat's code is Free software, actually. The page you link simply says they don't follow the free software distribution guidelines (and thus are not endorsed by the FSF/GNU project) because they also allow non-free software in their repos.

A better reference for Stallman's view here is probably https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html, which shows why Red Hat's business is probably reasonably described as a free software business (particularly since "the differences in extension of the category [open source] are small").

You're incorrect. Red Hat (and SUSE)'s distributions are free-as-in-freedom software (or at the very least, the majority of the distribution is free -- the link you posted is complaining about a very small minority of the software that is part of such distributions [which is a problem but is not as big of a problem as you claim]).

The fact that you won't get official updates after a trial period (or if your subscription runs out) isn't against the principles of free software. As a user, you still have the source code and have the freedom to maintain the distribution yourself (nobody does, but the freedom is still there).