[piaste]

First, you are making a completely unrelated argument. "Rocky helps sell RHEL": assuming it to be true, that is not a contribution to the open source world. It does not bring new software into the world. It is only a marketing help to IBM's balance sheet, and it helps only insofar as the open source world benefits from IBM making money from RHEL.

Second, the sole direct beneficiary of this hypothesis, IBM, apparently thinks it isn't true, and from what little comments they have released appears to have come to this conclusion after quite a bit of analysis.

Third, from my position of ignorance, I think IBM is probably correct. Why? Because the free burger in your analogy isn't Alma/Rocky, it's Fedora. A user who runs Fedora on workstations or small production servers is very likely to consider RHEL when choosing an enterprise distribution for large deployments, because they are already familiar with the ecosystem but they want stronger stability guarantees than Fedora Server. But a user who is running Alma/Rocky has much less reason to move to RHEL: they gain nothing but the license hassle.