[pipo234]

Okay, let's start with the software itself being free. That is, no-one pays for distribution or use, creation is sponsored voluntarily (contributions, donations) but this is not sustainable.

Customers may want to pay for training and consultancy, managed hosting, hardware, feature development, hand holding, insurance, productizing, etc. This is the business that RedHat is in, but so are MontaVista, AWS, vmware, Google, to name a few sponsors of Rocky. If everyone agrees to upstream a fair amount of their revenue, there should be plenty for RedHat to contribute into various projects.

Sure will be a bit of hassle to negotiate a fair price. But so far, these companies appear happy with the quote they pay Rocky, whereas the RedHat deal (per seat/per core/per instance/whatever) clearly is not. If RedHat had been more open to that kind of a deal with CentOS (8), there would probably never have been a Rocky Linux.

So yes, there is always the free loaders issue, but mostly people and businesses are open to sponsoring organizations that have a lot of goodwill.

[bonzini]

So two free distros are not enough, got it.

[pipo234]

Call me a hippie, but wouldn't it be great if Rocky got its way with free as in libre, while RedHat got its way with NOT free as in beer?

I for one am perfectly happy paying some. Appreciating that RedHat is not a charity, while also doing great work for the community I bought the distro and merchandise for years. Even when they changed course to target enterprises and I became less their target audience I kept supporting them for being a major contributor.

I feel bad that other distros try to profit from the free beer (and its implied enterprise quality), but restricting access to what is essentially a commons in order to force other through your front door takes away all of the goodwill.

[bonzini]

> Call me a hippie, but wouldn't it be great if Rocky got its way with free as in libre, while RedHat got its way with NOT free as in beer?

Now we're talking. :D

To me, the optimal outcome would have been a foundation overseeing the creation of a CentOS Stream derivative. Something that, in a unicorn-and-rainbows world, even Red Hat could join as mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Sharing the work and then competing on the services. However, based on this very blog post I have doubt that this is the idea of the money-making arm of the rebuilders.