[mrweasel]

As I see it, very little is actually moving "behind a paywall" (not trying be demening, just lacking a better term). Is systemd moving behind a paywall, no. Neither is Podman, Ansible, kernel patches, X11 patches and pretty much everything. It will all be available in CentOS stream and Fedora or upstreamed... But that's not what people want, they want RHEL, they just don't want the cost. Red Hats contributions was never about what went into RHEL, it is about what they upstream and maintain for the benefit of all distributions, which is a lot more than many believe.

The only thing you cannot get, without a subscription, is the source RPMs and the bit of tooling they need to build RHEL for their customers.

For what I've been hearing, and reading, this is a Red Hat decision, not an IBM decision. If we trust that or not, well... Still I'm not seeing how their contribution to open source isn't intact.