> Again, stop moving goalposts. Your comment was "why can't they just put it on FTP/WWW without support". That's exactly what they do.

That's exactly what they don't. You're the one who innocuous altered that to "without support and updates" which you know very well makes all the difference. If CentOS had the same non-update schedule as developer-RHEL, approximately nobody would use it in production. Contrawise, if RHEL did provide timely yum/dnf updates (and remove the murky "Development Use" clause), everyone would run that instead of CentOS. So now you're telling me to stop moving the goalposts back after you moved them to another field?

> You aren't required to register it in any way, including downloading.

Maybe I'm a bit dense, but I clicked on every download link on your page and they all led me to "Log in to your Red Hat account". Maybe you can post a direct URL to the ISOs?

> You want a free "product". That isn't their business model. At least they make the sources for everything available, which took Canonical years for Landscape.

No, I don't want a free product. I was stating from the first post that Red Hat Inc don't want people to have that. Which I'm completely fine with and fully support. You seem to be in complete agreement, so I don't know why you bothered with some quasi-rebuttal in the form of freebie Developer RHEL link which is very different from the CentOS/Rocky proposition.

> [details about the build process]

Ok, maybe the debranding part is not a big deal, I don't know. But my point only rests on the process being labour-intensive, hence expensive. Which I don't know you're disputing or agreeing with. If a CentOS rebuild is necessarily labour-intensive, I don't see a bright future for Rocky or similar projects. I think it is, since AFAICT almost every clone except Oracle gave up trying to keep up with RHEL 8. It's hard to prove things either way, but we'll find out soon enough if we follow the Rocky project.

> You inverted this argument and you're asking the wrong questions. The question isn't "why aren't people moving off CentOS?", it's "why did they use CentOS in the first place?"
It's because they were already familiar with RHEL from previous jobs,

So inertia / legacy / switching costs, we're exactly in agreement.

> and wanted familiar tooling (apt may be nicer than yum was, but dpkg is a dumpster fire for package maintainers compared to RPM, and RPM's tooling is much more cohesive than digging around in 10 different manpages for apt-cache || apt-file || dpkg -L || whatever to get information). Kickstart is nicer in many ways than preseed. Sure, the costs of swapping all of that are non-trivial both in the time investment for administrators to rewrite tooling and for the marginal loss in productivity until they re-learn tooling.

Now this is a completely different argument, that the RHEL/CentOS tooling are intrinsically superior to Debian/Ubuntu's. I'm pretty skeptical, since it implies that organizations who do run Debian/Ubuntu could save a lot by switching to CentOS and a bit of retraining. But this is of course not a dispute that's going to be settled in a thread like this, so let's leave it at that.

> [something about containers, OpenShift, K8s, divining Red Hat's Grand Strategy]

This does not seem on topic, so no comment.

Maybe I just expressed myself badly, so let my try again. I predict that Rocky Linux will not be a big success, and don't think doing a free-beer RHEL clone (CentOS as most users understood it) is a worthwhile endeavor, despite a seemingly large audience. Yes, giving good stuff away for free is popular (and I do believe RHEL is a good product). Because they're largely dependent on RH, who 1) appear not very enthusiastic about the idea of people running RHEL for free even without support, 2) can largely determine how expensive running a clone project will be. That's why IMO it's better to analyze if users really need a strict RHEL clone, or if what they want from it (xLTS, better tooling, commercial software compatibility, whatever) could be better developed on top of Debian, whose incentives seem to class less.
People who really really need a RHEL clone: time to pay up or go with the Stream (it probably really not-so-bad).

Now unlike you I have zero inside knowledge or experience, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass. But I am willing to make a somewhat falsifiable prediction, that Rocky and similar clone projects don't have much chance of success. Maybe I'm all wrong and Rocky can with a handful of volunteers and some clever scripts, resurrect CentOS-as-people-understood-it. Or maybe some deep-pocket 3rd party with a better brand than Oracle will step up. We'll find out a year or so.