> IBM will grumble a bit and then ultimately join the foundation because their alternative will be just writing off the investment they made in Red Hat and watch from the sidelines how most of the ecosystem stops depending on IBM's Red Hat.

You could have said that if they switched to using CentOS Stream, and that would even have been my favorite outcome as a Red Hat employee.

However, Rocky Linux is neither a sibling nor a fork of RHEL. It's a debranded clone that by definition cannot even have a single bugfix that isn't in RHEL. For Oracle it's okay because it's peanut money in order to annoy Red Hat, so they can afford this; for Amazon or Facebook it's no good and that's why they forked upstream at the Fedora or CentOS Stream level.

As long as Rocky Linux stays a RHEL rebuild built by a third party like the CentOS of 2010 (except backed by corporate money rather than a guy in Nebraska), Red Hat is already putting millions into "the foundation". That's what they pay for the thousand people that develop Rocky Linux, ahem RHEL. Without them, there can be no Rocky Linux at all. So, as long as Rocky's money making side keeps undermining Red Hat's money making side, game theory predicts no other outcome than death for both RHEL and Rocky.

_EDIT_: if you downvote, I'd be very glad to learn where I'm wrong