Not remotely.

Maybe certain people should think twice about setting up an entire business model of support based on having the current company do all the engineering work, cloning it, and then taking the support contracts for it.

Both Fedora and CentOS Stream are still very much upstream. Just certain CentOS alternatives are throwing a hissy-fit/tantrum that their nice neat little “cloned distro + support” business model fell apart overnight because they built their entire business off of what’s basically (not entirely) a loophole.

The Red Hat controversy has popped up a lot lately but this is the first time I’ve seen this perspective. It’s the the actual reason behind the change? Was there a distro particularly guilty of doing this?

Oracle for ages, and Red Hat had made changes in the last to make it more difficult for Oracle (something about the kernel patches).

Rocky more recently, CIQ had been selling support contracts, including a well publicized contract at NASA very recently for a few workstations.

If it was just AlmaLinux making a free clone I’m not sure if they would have made the change or not. Obviously they got rid of the original CentOS so it might have still been on their minds. Also, they were doing a lot of packaging and debranding work to enable this that was no benefit to Red Hat, so it may have been a matter of deciding the cost and resources was more than they could justify, especially when it is essentially putting the code in yet another, third place (Stream, customer SRPMs, the git site).