Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

That's a weird way of looking at it. The "market" demands what it demands, and the EL-based ecosystem is large. Frankly, I'd consider the RPM and DPKG worlds to be distinct, with RH controlling Fedora and RHEL (and thus all EL derivatives).

The fact remains that near-bug-for-bug compatibility with major RHEL releases is functionally all that matters for most EL-level ISVs, users, and operators. RHEL is making these harder to create, apparently unaware of how vast this ecosystem is and how important it is for their future sales and support contracts. RHEL complaints that people will run 3000 CentOS boxes and pay for three RHEL licenses for the boxes that some vendor requires upstream support contracts for, without realizing that there's a vast market there for real-world monetization of that for people that don't actually *need* to otherwise do so the vast majority of the time.

So yes, there's market and a need for this, and RH continues to shoot itself in the foot and piss away decades of goodwill through its actions here.

A true "centos" (Community Enterprise OS) that functioned with the bulk run like Debian, with certification done by a couple of big internet companies that would be fine throwing a $1M here and there to a non-profit that paid for it would cost a lot less than the $34B that IBM paid RH for. Amazon could do this with Prime Day pocket change.