Red Hats / IBM did this to themselves when they decided to kill CentOS. There are rumors that said Red Hat/ IBM was pissed that Rocky won a NASA contract, so they decided to pull the rug, stop releasing RHEL source code to non paying customers, and add clauses to their ToS to terminate contract with customers that redistribute the source code.

But you know what, if Red Hat/ IBM didn’t kill CentOS, Rocky wouldn’t exist. That NASA contract would’ve gone to Red Hat. Oracle Linux wouldn’t be as popular (because people would use CentOS), and SuSE wouldn’t provide free support to Rocky and Alma. Red Hat would still be the open source darling of the linux community, and IBM would still made a buttload of money.

Instead, they got greedy and think that all those CentOS downloads equals to lost RHEL sales (classic piracy equals to lost sales fallacy) and decided to kill CentOS to increase short term profits, which sprung Rocky and Alma (which truly eating their lunch because they also offer enterprise support). Red Hat didn’t learn it’s lesson and double down, and now have burned all of it’s remaining good reputation in the open source community.