[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.