IBM sees economic utility as just making money. They don't see the utility of name branding and ease of transition.
For example, I was using CentOS for prototype development. No way would I be able to get RHEL for this. CentOS allowed for not having to hassle with development license management with RHEL. Meaning more time spent on trying to get something work vs handling business to business logistics. This way, if the prototype was deemed acceptable, I could hand off OS management to IT and they could handle B2B logistics.
Now I no longer prototype with an easily transferable RHEL style OS. Means IBM just reduced their probability of receiving future support contracts. This is where IBM lacks understanding of economic utility.
The better example is that small companies could build on CentOS and when those small companies become big or get bought by someone big and get infested with useless middle management, RedHat could then sell support contracts into those businesses. CentOS was basically a big loss-leader to get lock-in and just wait until middle management went looking to throw money at vendor support to have someone else to blame.
IBM is now going to be cutting that channel off. They might juice a few more contracts in the short term, but mostly they're going to push small businesses away from the RHEL ecosystem entirely and cut off their pipeline of new leads.
> I was using CentOS for prototype development. No way would I be able to get RHEL for this.
Why doesn't the free RHEL developer subscription work for this use case? (Honestly curious, as I use it for similar prototype development and want to make sure I'm not missing something).
If you spin up a bunch of cattle, your automation and testing is going to want to be for your specific use case to get the meat from them - the moment you need to waste even 10 minutes dealing with (even uncertainties around) subscription management to name and enumerate each of your "pets", then you know the vendor doesn't care about your real-life problems and will persist in generating roadblocks to fulfill their business requirements while ignoring yours.
Where an option exists to do the CI/CD/testing/prototyping with an airgap or where no communication with the mothership is required, and no requests for licenses/subscriptions are needed for you to do your job, that option begins to look very appealing.
Sure, you may get a bunch of free dev licenses - but I believe the integration cost of using them costs more engineering effort than option #2: not bothering with any engineering integration effort to fulfil another business's requirements while you should instead be working on your own.
I see where you are coming from, but I've found it beneficial to my business to trade the minor inconvenience of free subscription management for the stability and long-term support for RHEL.
I get that others may not like that trade-off, but I was mostly curious if there were any specific reasons that would tip my personal scales. Sounds like there aren't.
Time is an economic utility. Managing developer account(s) and licensing is a time sink to bad utility. Also dealing with the B2B sales department is also within that time sink. More friction to use a product for a prototype is also a bad utility.
Just look at the developer Subscription FAQ and there are a bunch of possible issues that one must spend time to work around. Loading CentOS is near frictionless.
For example, I was using CentOS for prototype development. No way would I be able to get RHEL for this. CentOS allowed for not having to hassle with development license management with RHEL. Meaning more time spent on trying to get something work vs handling business to business logistics. This way, if the prototype was deemed acceptable, I could hand off OS management to IT and they could handle B2B logistics.
Now I no longer prototype with an easily transferable RHEL style OS. Means IBM just reduced their probability of receiving future support contracts. This is where IBM lacks understanding of economic utility.