[soneil]

> And IMO, was it worth it?

I suspect they're playing with unintended consequences now.

One of the nice "features" of buying CentOS, is that it meant CentOS was never going to compete - there was a clear line between community and professional, and CentOS were never going to sell you professional services.

Pushing everyone to non-RH builds has removed that line, and there's a strong chance that non-RH builds selling professional services, is going to have a higher opportunity-cost than publishing CentOS did.

[bonzini]

That wasn't relevant in buying CentOS, plenty of people were selling personal services for CentOS. IBM itself was doing it, and perhaps Kyndryl is still doing the same for the newfangled RHEL rebuilds.

And even now, technically RESF is the one producing the distro and it's also not selling professional services. Who produces the distro has no effect on who sells the services.

[soneil]

"technically" is a really thin veneer though. The founder of Rocky is also the CEO of CIQ. That's not exactly six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

(to be clear: I don't consider this a problem. But I do consider that for RH, this may be an unintended side-effect.)

[nequo]

> and there's a strong chance that non-RH builds selling professional services, is going to have a higher opportunity-cost than publishing CentOS did.

Could you clarify what you mean by opportunity cost here? Who faces this cost and why?

[denimnerd42]

IBM faces this cost. Before they created this fracture in the EL community there wasn't all this interest and support behind centos alternatives. People just used centos for free or rhel for support. now you could potentially use EL with support from another vendor without IBM seeing a dime.