I think, in the short run, they are hoping some percentage of Rocky/Alma users will migrate to RHEL. I don’t believe they are really thinking about the long term.

But why would they want to kill their acquistion like that though?

I can only recommend you look at the last decade of IBM’s history in that respect.

Squeeze the existing users for cash.

The enterprises will just pay it. It’ll be cheaper than a migration for critical servers.

Corps pull the same gameplay each time:

1. Buy product
2. Jack prices to the roof
3. Kill R&D and enshittify support to minimize cost
4. Extract profit until other products make a higher profit margin
5. Shutdown support and repeat with a new product