"If Red Hat continues to cause trouble for RHEL clones, here's what you can expect:

  * Many customers and professionals helping with enterprise deployments will consider abandoning RHEL and not supporting it.  

  * New users will start considering Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE or something else which is there to stay.

  * Universities/IT Courses will also switch to replacements like Ubuntu or openSUSE instead of dabbling between RHEL clones, CentOS Stream, and Fedora."

"The decision that Red Hat has taken, does make sense as a business. But it also doesn't. It makes sense for short term goals. Not in the long term."

===

This decision is good for Red Hat's bottom line, but bad for the RHEL ecosystem long term.

This decision restricts RHEL so that it is effectively closed source. Some businesses and governments will continue to use RHEL for the time being, but most users have other Linux distributions to choose from.

Most users and developers won't use RHEL or develop software against it because RHEL's use is restricted to paying customers. EPEL will shrink and only have software that big businesses, governments, and similar organizations need. In the long run, this means that RHEL will be less like other Linux distributions and more like AIX or Solaris.