[bonzini]

By builders I mean specifically those users that work with the full set of RPMs of the distro. It's not a badge of honor, it's a specific and very specialized way to consume what a distro offers.

In the case of EL, Fedora and CentOS Stream are communities that office both users and builders, but the two groups congregate in different places. For example EPEL is targeted at the user community but it is outside the focus of the builder community. ELN is of interest to builders but it is outside the focus of the user community.

All users can choose to contribute (with bug reports, code, whatever) at either the upstream or the distro level; or they can just be users. Builders are a (very small) subset of the people who consume a distro, and like all users they can choose how much to participate in the community and whether to be contributors or not.

[geerlingguy]

The builders enable the downstream users, though.

But that ship sailed, the good of the downstream users' contributions are not enough to cancel out the negative net value of the builders' bad behavior.

[bonzini]

I absolutely haven't said I consider builders bad and I also was careful not to say rebuilders! I am being very careful with my words. Please don't put things I didn't say in my mouth.

However: unfortunately part of what you said is true. Red Hat apparently took this decision because of some new facts that caused the negative from the "rebuilders" to increase, and the decision had the potential of hurting the users of the rebuilds.

Fortunately it's clear now that there are multiple ways for the downstreams to adapt[1]. Users will be able to keep their distros and—if they wish—contribute in a number of ways to the community. And builders and Red Hat will be able to collaborate in a shared place which is ELN for major released and Stream for minor releases. In a sense this removes excuses from Red Hat and should make everyone feel safer.

[1] you could say despite Red Hat's change, and I accept that. But it's also thanks to Red Hat going overall beyond the requirements of the open source licenses, with things such as Stream and the UBI source container.