Yes, they covered home users, and probably decided to take the hit on the few tens of thousands of small businesses buying a $1k or so of subscriptions a year (and not via Dell/HP/etc). Which probably wasn't even a hit once they factored in the weight of having account managers, and the like looking at a tiny $1k a year deals.
But it completely ignores the "build our product on centos" appliance market that existed. As well as a few others that might have shipped fairly significant volumes, but never wanted/needed support or did their own product+linux support as part of their general support channel. Yes, various hyperscalers were doing that and rebranding their own modified versions but that was more an error on the part of RHEL to fail to listen to those users anyway.
Basically RH has consistently failed to understand that centos was the "OEM/toolkit" version of RHEL for a lot of pretty serious organizations.
Yes, they covered home users, and probably decided to take the hit on the few tens of thousands of small businesses buying a $1k or so of subscriptions a year (and not via Dell/HP/etc). Which probably wasn't even a hit once they factored in the weight of having account managers, and the like looking at a tiny $1k a year deals.
But it completely ignores the "build our product on centos" appliance market that existed. As well as a few others that might have shipped fairly significant volumes, but never wanted/needed support or did their own product+linux support as part of their general support channel. Yes, various hyperscalers were doing that and rebranding their own modified versions but that was more an error on the part of RHEL to fail to listen to those users anyway.
Basically RH has consistently failed to understand that centos was the "OEM/toolkit" version of RHEL for a lot of pretty serious organizations.