This article is actually very good at explaining exactly what is it Redhat is doing and why. And I find myself in agreement with author's conclusion.

I started my Linux journey with Redhat Linux 5.1 (Manhattan) I got on CD-Roms in a paper computer magazine. This was in late 90s long before anyone came up with the name "red hat enterprise Linux". Red Hat was the distribution that took Linux and packaged it and a huge library of software on cd-roms. It was free. It was popular. It brought Linux to the masses including to myself. Also it provided tremendous value to people like me(at school at the time) who couldn't even afford Internet access at home. It gave me access to a huge library of quality open source software for free which was a basis of my first tiny side IT business (small office servers and support) that meant I could now afford to buy better hardware, dial-up for as long as I wanted and eventually a 128kb DSL line to the internet. When RHEL came out with their licensing I considered it a sort of "step back" towards the "old" paid software business model. I didn't like it at all. I turned away from Redhat for many years favoring Debian.

Forward a couple of decades later, and I'm no longer doing small office servers as a side hustle, but I'm working full time consulting for fortune 500 companies. In this environment RHEL is seen as a safe choice. Whenever an important physical linux system is deployed it's running RHEL and it is fully licensed with best support. I can count on fingers of one hand the times my employers actually used RHEL enterprise support during my entire career, but they still paid for it. Why? Because it limited the risk. What about dev, and test systems? What about VMs no one really cared about? All of them run CentOS. Why? So people that run these systems that didn't have to be so highly available could use the same tools to manage them. So we would know if something worked on CentOS it would probably work on rhel due to same versions of software etc. It was neat, but I'm sure it really cut into RedHat's bottom line. Consider that Microsoft was paid for every single server, regardless if it was just a developer sandbox or a highly available email server. Also MS made you pay for support for all of them. Yes, you could have different levels of support for various servers, but beyond certain numbers of servers/users the only way to buy MS software was with very expensive support. Using Linux in general was seen as a money saving method precisely because CentOS was available for less important stuff and you could buy RHEL for production systems. In a way CentOS was a marketing vehicle for RHEL.

But about 5 years ago this has started to change. More and more big companies I worked with moved to "the cloud". Although you could use rhel there, almost no one did. AWS had their own distro of Linux(based on rhel too) now that too was seen as a safe choice. Also, containers, autoscaling, ease of provisioning and general robustness of Linux in general created an environment where the value of rhel support to businesses was much lower. Cloud technologies have seriously started eating Redhat's cake in large companies IMO.

So RedHad had to do something to stay afloat. And they did. Is it enough to save them? I don't know, but for sure they don't deserve the hate they get for it.

Would I recommend Rhel to anyone other than a huge business that can absorb the cost? Of course not.