[dralley]

A) There have been no "threats" towards anyone much less customers. There was a lot of discussion taking place here and in other places about what was theoretically possible as per license agreement, but no "threats".

B) Oracle cannot be described as a "steward" if their entire goal is to produce a RHEL clone using the sources provided by Red Hat. Oracle "stewards" a kernel package themselves, but that's about it. The explicit goal of their distribution is to cede the bulk of the decisionmaking to Red Hat and be "compatible".

C) "The sources" are not behind a paywall. CentOS Stream is "the sources". The only difference between now and 6 months ago is that it used to be the case that the specfiles for every package in the distro were maintained in a single publicly facing git repository which made it trivial to rebuild the entire distro, whereas now you would have to create a mapping of which exactly CentOS Stream packages were used first, which is not as straightforward as having it all in one place. It is nonetheless possible to do. It's probably fair to call it an obfuscation technique, but not fair to call it closed source, because it isn't.