This looks like exactly what Red Hat wanted. Other distributions to use CentOS Stream and contribute to the open source community instead of just copying their work. Hardly a "pitchfork mob."
I agree. Still fun nonetheless, seeing some of the biggest players banding together against a competitor.
It's still an issue though for mainly science areas with large HPC clusters who need stable supported OS releases for extremely expensive specialty software. Looking at the pricing, Redhat now wants to take quite a large chunk in licensing fees out of science budgets.
Not really because Red Hat doesn't do HPC stuff unless I'm mistaken. Alma leaned into that by basing on CentOS Stream, being ABI compatible with RHEL, and creating an HPC SIG. The exact things Red Hat was encouraging people to do. The whole point was to get these companies to get involved in the community instead of copy pasting. Despite all the bitching and moaning, it seems to be working.
Nah, prices have gone up considerably. Generally around 250~350€ per year per Server depending on your deal for Redhat. SUSE is about the same, both are currently recalculating, most likely upping the price. HPC-nodes cost less (somewhere around 30-80€/year). But they make it all way too complicated by binding license costs to CPU count for example and now after abandoning that to other nonsense. Lead to a brief popularity of dual-core servers a few years ago, since Oracle licenses were all CPU-core count based. Don't know how that is currently going.
Also it depends on other stuff like support levels and whatnot. We once had to get an expert on licensing costs to get an offer for licensing a few servers and even these people could not respond immediately and had to go through several documents to calculate the price - note those weren't resellers, those were from the Company themselves. I had to stiffle a few laughes during that conference...