It's interesting because if RHEL had no value add nobody would pay for it and nobody would be angry about this change. All of these angry posts are proof in a way that they are putting in valuable work.
If RHEL is only for paying people, as McGrath from the pulpit so expounds, most people are gonna leave. The value was having a community, a good path, that extended from open source to paid support. If McGrath blows up one end of the continuum, the other end will certainly wither collapse & die. This is a deathmark. People are upset to see a vibrant world shut off and thus shut down, whatever the value/greed/whatever of the situation. A pillar of Linux has left the chat.
It wasn't worth putting up with so many free users for a paid product, just to have a small minority actually pay anything.
It used to be worth it for 20+ years. Now something changed.
For my servers I used to use 95% centos, 5% rhel. Now I’ll use 0% rhel.
I didn’t need support for most servers but I liked having comparability for when things grew into needing it.
RH doesn't understand this.
Either you don't understand what CentOS stream is, or you're being ridiculously hyperbolic.
It's exactly these kinds of fiddly details that get weaponized when you want to derail a distro. It's not easy or frictionless anymore.
It's starting to change, but for years people would look at me like I was crazy for running Debian/unstable aka Debian/sid on my machines/personal servers. Being willing to have volatile systems is a big barrier. Only having "dogfood this wip" or "pay us" as the two options is a radical ask, one that doesn't really seem survivable to me (rh/centos won't go away, but their mindshare seems likely to implode to me).
Last year, with RH cancelling CentOS, I switched to Rocky expecting another 8+ years of updates. We'll see how that pans out.