Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

> Not only that, RH invested a lot of effort into retooling the entire CentOS and RHEL development pipeline so that it was done completely in the open, and completely opened their internal tooling so that everyone could use it, making it vastly easier for the likes of Alma and Rocky to both spin up their own efforts, and keep them going.

Sure, but none of that was necessary to take over Centos (and a lot of it was already under way before the Centos take over). It was done to try to convince the few entities that *did* contribute some engineering Centos-side, to continue in a Red Hat context. Not sure if it was worth the effort, really, while it did avoid complete Centos implosion it weakened Fedora understanding both outside and within IBM. If IBM management really believes “useful productivisable” centos stream condenses out of thin air without something like “non business critical” Fedora bellow they’ll be in deep trouble in a few years.

By the time Solaris and AIX marketshare sank except in a few niches (for the second) they still had not finished the transition from ksh 83 (as in 1983) to ksh 95 (as in 1995). That’s where trying to trim “non business critical” bits leads.