The writing's been on this wall since at least 2014, when RedHat took over CentOS. Having a free gateway to your paid product is fine, but at some point you ne

The writing's been on this wall since at least 2014, when RedHat took over CentOS. Having a free gateway to your paid product is fine, but at some point you need to give potential customers a nudge they can't refuse. Pre-2014 it was fairly obvious that a full clone of a commercially supported product, with the proverbial 'just a search-and-replace of the product name', was going to attract interest & action from upstream. OTOH in the ~25 years I've been using Debian, I've never been (rudely) surprised by one of their announcements. Their social contract [0] is clear on every point that's relevant to users of an OS, especially users looking to commit long term to a platform. [0] https://www.debian.org/social_contract https://www.debian.org/social_contract