I personally ended all my projects' support for RHEL and CentOS a few weeks after that went down. They were already a massive pain in the ass to support, and h

I personally ended all my projects' support for RHEL and CentOS a few weeks after that went down. They were already a massive pain in the ass to support, and had a smaller userbase than other Linux distributions (<10% for RHEL and CentOS combined is typical). For me, that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. I don't really think that IBM/RedHat really saw CentOS as a gateway to RHEL, but as a source of lost sales. I think CentOS had great indirect value to them. It let people like me create, test and support software on RHEL without having RHEL licences. I neither want nor need them, nor could I justify them in the absence of paying customers to underwrite the cost. CentOS gets used for test environments, home use, self-supporting commercial use etc. I don't think many of those would really result in conversions to paying RHEL subscriptions. But they do serve to introduce people to the RHEL ecosystem. Maybe the strategy makes commercial sense. I don't know, or particularly care. But as an exercise in destroying a community which provided the extended support and software ecosystem around your core product, I think that was a strategic blunder. There are an awful lot of people who now won't be recommending RHEL to their customers, and the willingness of third-parties to test and support their software on RHEL has taken a hit, and that in turn reduces the value of using RHEL.