Because our political class sold its backbone, tongue, and soul for a fake and hollow silver trinket. Despite all the developments, business has remained the same over the millennia. Sell, sell more, keep selling more is pretty much all there is to business. Add the self inflicted legal obligation of having to deliver profits to the shareholders.

The above three came together, and RedHat caved in. Off handed, I could think of an alternate model they could have built, alongside the per copy subscription model. Charge per XYZ number of support tickets or queries. This way, if their claim that Oracle and other freeloaders are merely rebranding RedHat’s work is even half true, the queries would have eventually found their way back to RedHat. At this point, RedHat sales could have begged those querying only customers to subscribe, even if at a discount.

If I, having never worked on sales or business side, can come up with the model above, professionals steeped in business should be able to come up with more. Instead, RedHat chose to wade further into the grey area towards the illegal territory, in the hopes that no one would dare suing.

Business is merely refusing to work with a new item which in this case happens to be open source. Right to repair movement exists for similar reasons. Business has become our impediment. Taming their sizes would have been possible had our political class did not sell itself for dime a dozen.