Access to Web Services
So RedHat started this trend way back, around 20 years ago, if I recall. Every single thing RedHat ships is Free and Open Source software, meaning that they are obligated to make thier code changes available to their customers AND the maintainers of the original project.
Generally, open source licenses do not stipulate that access to the source
code be free to anyone, so RedHat started locking down access to paying
customers along with the launch of Fedora and the retirement of the original
RedHat distribution (again, I fuzzy recall that RedHat 9 was the last freely
available RedHat titled distribution), now there’s Fedora
and
RedHat Enterprise Linux
which requires a paid subscription to access.
Because of the underlying software licenses, there’s nothing RedHat can do
to stop Rocky Linux
or Alma Linux
from making access to the same
software free (as long as that software doesn’t include any RedHat tradmarks
or logos).
That is, RedHat being a very large and very old distribution, has two separate projects willing to pay the infrastructure money required to replicate the RedHat distribution path. That server space isn’t free, someone is paying real money for it so that both individuals and corporations can use a recent “RedHat compatible” distribution for free.
I’ve just recently started using Python, and there’s a whole bunch of development advice based on these cool tools