Well, the company I work for today has some sort of an "exclusive" contract that allows us to have different use pattern than individual / corporate "end users"

Well, the company I work for today has some sort of an "exclusive" contract that allows us to have different use pattern than individual / corporate "end users". But this is because we "wanted" to be "partners" (I don't know the legal details), i.e. we made some effort to acquire this special status, and I don't know anything about the financial workings that were involved in becoming this kind of "special friends". On the other hand, I worked for another company before, which was making a distributed storage product that targeted, beside other things RHEL (well, we really only used CentOS) because that was perceived as potentially most common customer profile. None of us wanted CentOS for our development needs, nor were we using CentOS for our own infrastructure etc. So, we paid nothing to Red Hat. I don't know how much this "special friendship" would cost if we had to buy any kind of a license to simply target RHEL (but we'd need a lot of machines running it -- during my time there we had ~20 ESX for testing, so... idk, that'd be what... couple thousands VMs? -- something like that).