Ah yes, the Rocky Linux attitude in action. Red hat has done and continues to do absolutely nothing deserving of thanks. Not for their work on fedora, not centos stream, not the myriad of projects that they maintain, absolutely nothing.
Now this base is gone, and we're still trying to find our new base. This is highly damaging.
I'm not keeping sides (Rocky vs. Alma, etc.), but it was a rugpull for us, worldwide.
I know it's said that "freeloader" is a term used for companies abusing their license terms or using loopholes by buying 10 licenses and using the KB with 10K CentOS nodes, but it didn't help at the end.
So, RedHat/IBM handled this very badly and roughly. Their perception slipped from "One of the oldest distributions we respect as a community" to "Another tech company which wants money" very fast and very abruptly.
This is sad.
Finally, I wanted to say something about the term "freeloaders" I've seen many use it. This is a mostly internal term we have at Red Hat, it looks like at some point it slipped out in the public. So what does it mean? A freeloader is when a large enterprise business has 20 RHEL licenses, 150,000 community rebuild systems, and sometimes hundreds of user accounts and hundreds of kbase searches per month. It's not the enthusiasts, it's not the hackers and coders, it's not the academics, and it's not the people that use rebuilders because they can't afford it. We really try not to use the term, but when we do, it's about the large companies that can afford to pay but don't.
At the end of the day, we became labeled as freeloaders, even if it was unintentional. Also the quote above acknowledges us (researchers, enthusiasts, coders, hackers (in folklore sense)), and does nothing to address about the rugpull we had gone through.
The only thing we got after that was discontinuation of SRPMS like a slap on the face.
[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7080669...
We sponsor the Fedora Flock conference, the only opportunity to fiscally support Fedora, and will continue to do so. Same with the CentOS Connect conference. Those checks get written directly to Red Hat, by the way.
Given you work for Red Hat, we can even say we've paid you a little! :)
It's more than words and sponsorship--I really do mean it when I say I want to empower the Enterprise Linux community, and I'm thrilled that Rocky is at a point where we're able to do so.