RH presumably has access to far more detailed statistics on usage and adoption of CentOS and RHEL than we do. Many of the execs at RH have been at the company for decades, and so will have been observing these statistics over the years and through various transition periods.
I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. RH have concluded from the data they have that clones are siphoning away their profits. Until RH starts taking a financial hit from this (so far they are doing great!) I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing.
> I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t.
No contempt whatsoever, this decision of theirs is very well aligned with most companies do. Also, it's not that I'm seeing and they don't, it's just the whole "lost revenue" fallacy from piracy or clones or wtv, that I don't like. Just like I actually detest the whole "capture users" lingo usually used nowadays.
> I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing.
I'm inclined to believe that, like any other big corp, some exec, board member, or any kind of higher up, just saw Oracle and Rocky ads, saw their own usage and wtv metric they had for freeloaders, and wanted to get money back, or not bleed to other vendors, specially something like Oracle.
Again, no matter how much statistics they have on Clone Adoption, the impact on ecosystem on a whole is unmeasurable. It's a big ecosystem system, and such big change has side effects. They most likelt won't matter in this decade, and because so much shit will change till the next one, we will never be able to tell for sure if this was well worth it.
What is undeniable truth is that customers are worth off. And I don't think Redhat was at an existential risk the way they were operating.
Capitalism works as long as company actually care about the customers. Limiting who can service a customer is not good for the customers. That's all.
I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. RH have concluded from the data they have that clones are siphoning away their profits. Until RH starts taking a financial hit from this (so far they are doing great!) I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing.