> This isn't that. This largely seems to be people who are not paying for RHEL demanding Red Hat allow them to continue not paying for it but receive its value.

> This isn't that. This largely seems to be people who are not paying for RHEL demanding Red Hat allow them to continue not paying for it but receive its value. Well... I am not so sure about that. As I wrote above, it's actually easier to make a copy-cat of RHEL today by leveraging CentOS Stream than anytime before. So it's not about costs, but perhaps more about the inconvenience of switching off the old workflow for the new hotness. Red Hat has no technical self interest in perpetuating an old legacy service considering that CentOS has itself migrated to CentOS Stream. Please remember that maintaining that CentOS git repo was really a self-serving activity, to help CentOS project rebuild RHEL packages using the clunky old workflow. In reality supporting the old workflow was never an act of charity, Red Hat did that for whatever business reasons following the CentOS take-over. Certainly the old workflow benefited other folks beyond CentOS community, namely the other copy-cat rebuild distributions. And certainly, as you have argued, there is the side-effect of the old legacy service benefiting copy-cat distros, and by extension the cost-free user community. But as I argue, not necessarily opposing your view, but offering a counter point... it's more of an inconvenience that some folks seem to wilfully or genuinely misunderstand. The misunderstanding is that Red Hat is killing copy-cat distros, and they are not. Super smart & motivated people will still copy-cat Enterprise Linux, just like they always have. And certainly, Red Hat probably has near zero interest in helping any competitors rebuild packages, or compose the distro. But it's a stretch for folks to argue that ending one workflow in favor of another is slapping the faces of loyal free-loaders. The nexus of ideas/arguments from the one starting point to the wrong conclusion is just tenuous at best, so I'm not surprised some people would construct a straw man argument narrowly focused on short-term outcomes. Folks just need to get on-board with CentOS Stream, or setup some other way to rebuild EL packages. It's not that hard to reason about this topic.