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I think the work being done with Rocky and Alma linux is great! Many kudos to them.

However, I'm worried history will simply repeat itself or RHEL will make downstreaming difficult in some way, which could kill those projects.

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My understanding is that CentOS as we once knew it (the freely-distributable rebuild of EL 7 and earlier) withered away because its creator and primary maintainer was hired by Red Hat. There was a clear conflict of interest at that point, and Red Hat probably wasn't going to keep paying him to maintain a project in perpetuity that ate into their bottom line.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/centos-project-leader-k...

So it's not so much that RHEL tried to strong-arm third-party rebuilders of Enterprise Linux - and I don't think it's in their culture to try - but people involved in these projects are always at risk of being bought out. Volunteering for open source can be a lot of work.

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