Dude deliberately ignores the whole category of RHEL users -- integrators. Say, an integrator needs to make sure some program works with RHEL, and, let's say that program works with big clusters of computers (well, think something like Ceph, or maybe Slurm etc.) Now, the integrators will need hundreds of machines running RHEL... and if they have to pay license fees for that, well, that ain't gonna happen. If cornered, integrators will just go away and not use RHEL at all, and then the value of RHEL will also drop.
Of course, any software developer targeting RHEL is also kind of an integrator, and if their company also needs to buy hundreds or thousands of licenses, well, the same thing applies.
This gets even weirder and worse if you think about using public cloud providers, who act as RHEL redistributors -- but you need to somehow have your own VM images... with RHEL. (I work for a company in this exact situation r.n.) Are we "freeloaders"? Because, I guess, if we are, then we might stop, but I don't see how that would benefit RHEL, because we'd have to drop support for RHEL instead of paying so much in license fees.
That's not how we partner with Integrators, VARs, ISVs and other Partners. We have several programs to assist our Partners in making their development environments, production systems or SaaS platforms cost effective and sustainable. Even individuals, hobbyists, OSS developers have options.
Integrators and partners usually pay to be part of the game, that is one reason why the whole certification industry exists, and how many certified persons a company must have to be part of the game.
Well, the company I work for today has some sort of an "exclusive" contract that allows us to have different use pattern than individual / corporate "end users". But this is because we "wanted" to be "partners" (I don't know the legal details), i.e. we made some effort to acquire this special status, and I don't know anything about the financial workings that were involved in becoming this kind of "special friends".
On the other hand, I worked for another company before, which was making a distributed storage product that targeted, beside other things RHEL (well, we really only used CentOS) because that was perceived as potentially most common customer profile. None of us wanted CentOS for our development needs, nor were we using CentOS for our own infrastructure etc. So, we paid nothing to Red Hat. I don't know how much this "special friendship" would cost if we had to buy any kind of a license to simply target RHEL (but we'd need a lot of machines running it -- during my time there we had ~20 ESX for testing, so... idk, that'd be what... couple thousands VMs? -- something like that).
Of course, any software developer targeting RHEL is also kind of an integrator, and if their company also needs to buy hundreds or thousands of licenses, well, the same thing applies.
This gets even weirder and worse if you think about using public cloud providers, who act as RHEL redistributors -- but you need to somehow have your own VM images... with RHEL. (I work for a company in this exact situation r.n.) Are we "freeloaders"? Because, I guess, if we are, then we might stop, but I don't see how that would benefit RHEL, because we'd have to drop support for RHEL instead of paying so much in license fees.