[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.)