"Although without legal teeth, in practice wouldn't this become very challenging to keep enforced?" Well, enforcement is entirely another matter. It might turn

"Although without legal teeth, in practice wouldn't this become very challenging to keep enforced?" Well, enforcement is entirely another matter. It might turn into a nightmare of whack-a-mole for Red Hat, I have no idea. I'm only saying that AIUI, Red Hat can do what they're doing and still be GPL compliant. It may impact the clones' ability to claim "bug-for-bug" compatibility with RHEL, though. At least without making them a focal point for lawyers. But I have no idea how things will spin out from here. "Conversely if the rest of the world mostly moved on" This is looking like a possibility. Things are pretty fragmented now as it is with RHEL leading paid Linux, Ubuntu leading unpaid Linux, and each major cloud provider have their own Linux offerings + Ubuntu & RHEL. (Also Debian in there..) I don't know that this is the smart move by Red Hat. It feels like a gamble to me, but it's theirs to make.