No, it's the same. I think the amount of upstream contributions (i.e. patches) that the entity sends offsets some of the ethicality deficit. At some point it would even go positive if they send enough upstream fixes.

Obviously this is entirely my opinion :-D

There's also an impossible-to-measure factor in the form of eco-system benefit though. For example, I would never have paid for RHEL had I not entered into the eco-system through Fedora and CentOS. So while RH didn't make money from my CentOS usage, it did eventually make them money because I bought RHEL later when it was worth it. I don't know how you would calculate that, but it does offset ethicality deficit somewhat as well

hi - thank you for speaking plainly to a large tech audience. Isnt there some "market correction" due though, overall, since OSS and Linux have become so central, so deeply performant, while the engineers and other "community" repeatedly get zero money.. Although the point of simply cloning and re-selling the work of RedHat, perhaps with support claims, might look bad, we overall have to allow some growth for non-centralized players right?

Yes, I agree there's value in decentralization. And to clarify, I don't think there are is anything unethical about offering a RHEL clone like Rocky and Alma do. I think that's a net positive for everyone, even Red Hat. My beef is more with the people that sell support which directly undermines Red Hat and ultimately hurts all eco-system users because it means less development, less QA, etc.

That said market competition in general is a good thing, and I don't doubt for a minute that Red Hat prices would be a lot higher without the competition. It's a complex equation that's impossible to calculate since the inputs are immeasurable and in many cases theoretical.