Yes, however that's always been something you just kind of accepted with free software. That's part of what giving something away for free entails: not everyone is going to give something, or anything at all, back.
“Freeloader” here really means someone like the IT guy that occasionally spins up a microservice in a Linux Docker container because that’s what he saw suggested on Reddit, but is otherwise proudly promoting his Microsoft certs on LinkedIn.
The difference with say Oracle Awesome Linux or whatever is that they are selling RH’s value add work and ecosystem as a service. As in they literally come in “Buy this stuff to be supported with our other stuff, we ship whatever RH ships.”
IMO, Red Hat’s changes are really making it more expensive to create exclusive “Oracle Red Hat for X” or similar business models. The people who can’t afford RHEL for their academic HPI still can’t, and just pick something else. People here quacking about Fedora are just quacking - Fedora is a project with a commercial purpose that serves the company’s needs. It will exists until it doesn’t.
RH isn’t Microsoft - everyone acknowledges that lots of distros exist and many are excellent. You can start a distribution today. But “fine, I’ll just use Debian” isn’t really a valid answer either. Debian is an awesome project and product, but if you chose Red Hat in the first place for reasons other than “I got a CD with a magazine in 1998”, Debian probably isn’t ideal without you doing alot of work. Then it’s a money discussion. (Cost of humans doing stuff vs paying RH to do stuff and humans to do other stuff)
I would extend that to almost noone.
99% of people are going to not give anything back. 0.9% will file complaints or bug reports or donate money or whatever. 0.1% will actually give back any functional code.
Don’t know why people are very passive when it comes it.
In US, depending on who you ask / how you count, the number is anywhere from 50% to 75%.