The hat losing its red: a break in the virtuous cycle of RedHat?

On the last few days, many are talking about the changes RedHat is making about the access of their source code.

If you are not aware, in short they plan limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources by putting them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal, maintaining public only the CentOS Stream sources.

What I would like to address is not the legal aspects, or GPL licenses details but, instead, the thing I'm not seeing on the news yet, which is:

The break of the virtuous cycle

Both RedHat Linux and the Linux Kernel itself have one secret sauce that no proprietary software will ever have: a community of free users which not only reports bugs and proposes improvements, but which reinforces the authority and value of the open source project in question (even when they are not paying a penny).

Their user base, include the growing mass of free users, is not a regular one. It's an army of advocates of your product and brand.

Users of CentOS (and then AlmaLinux, Rocky) always recognized the solidity and quality of their distribution of choice because of RedHat.

In my personal analysis, the RedHat's annual revenue of $3.4 billion and their growth of more than…