Perhaps if you need to acquire and shutdown your competitors, you should shut down your own firm, or at least pursue a different strategy. Monopolistic business strategies are crass.
Leave out the "cr" and I agree
RH did great financially for many years while CentOS was around; do you have some reason to claim that it was an existential threat?
because having CentOS lead to Oracle Linux being a thing which allowed big competitor to offer what was essentially 100% compatible product to your own while undercutting your support costs.
I don't think RHEL/IBM cares about the small losses on CentOS/Rocky/Alma/etc what they found was hurting them was companies like Oracle
I don't think that's correct; AFAIK OEL has always pulled directly from RHEL sources. That is, they were a sibling, not a downstream of CentOS. I am open to the idea that CentOS was basically collateral damage as Red Hat attempted to block Oracle, but that's not the same thing.
That's what I'm suggesting - the only way RHEL could block OEL is to also kill off CentOS as we knew it.