Sounds like it is time to fork and own it. Just as legal as what IBM is doing and people might vote with their feet rather than pay the IBM tax.
There's enough of a community to own this. Jenkins is a good role model. So is Libre Office. Oracle was once on the other end; now they are on the receiving end. So, I'm guessing they might be interested in being on the other end this time. Between them, Amazon, and maybe a few smaller companies there should be enough to pull together an independent fork, a and leave IBM to piece together long term support by themselves. The goal would be to have a stable long term version but I'd say IBM's involvement might be optional at this point. And what's left of Red Hat might be tempted to jump ship. Shape it like a foundation and make sure that there is no single corporate owner that can change their mind and you have a fine basis for decades to come.
Red Hat has even been making this easier for the last few years...
Back in 2003, when they discontinued Red Hat Linux (RHEL's predecessor) and locked binary RPMs behind a subscription (to similar outrage), the clones didn't have an easy time. RHEL's build process was behind closed doors and doing rebuilds meant reverse engineering the proper build order. This is why CentOS major versions took quite a while to appear after the corresponding RHEL releases (and made CentOS a major effort).
Since Red Hat assimilated CentOS, and culminating with CentOS Stream becoming the upstream for RHEL itself, the build system became unified.
This is highly valuable. That clones aren't taking advantage of this to jumpstart themselves into independence (and ensuring the Red Hat ecosystem has a future, with or without Red Hat) is just sad.
There's enough of a community to own this. Jenkins is a good role model. So is Libre Office. Oracle was once on the other end; now they are on the receiving end. So, I'm guessing they might be interested in being on the other end this time. Between them, Amazon, and maybe a few smaller companies there should be enough to pull together an independent fork, a and leave IBM to piece together long term support by themselves. The goal would be to have a stable long term version but I'd say IBM's involvement might be optional at this point. And what's left of Red Hat might be tempted to jump ship. Shape it like a foundation and make sure that there is no single corporate owner that can change their mind and you have a fine basis for decades to come.