So who should be doing that work? On whose payroll? Should Red Hat engineers be spending their time de-branding and wrapping things up neatly for rebuilders to use? Note that every minute they spend on that is a minute they're not spending on adding features, fixing bugs, or backporting fixes to the last ten years' worth of releases. You know, the things they're actually obligated to do by their contracts with customers. Why should they continue letting free work for non-contractual partners - who seem increasingly inclined to be competitors - displace or delay that?
This is the rebuilders' burden, and always has been. It should be their engineers doing that work, just as with other open-source project. If you want to rebuild TensorFlow or React, slap on your own branding, maybe sell support or consulting for it or enable others[1] to do so, do you think those teams will go out of their way to repackage stuff for your convenience? That's above and beyond common open-source practice. Expecting Red Hat to continue going above and beyond forever just seems awfully entitled.
[1] "Team members don't do X but sponsors do" deserves its own thread.
Note that they're actually doing more work now (checking for contractual entitlements, playing whack-a-mole with rebuilders, trying to reassure ecosystem partners, etc etc) than they did before.
I'm not sure that's true at all. Having done a bit of packaging myself, I'm well aware that it's hard, tedious, frustrating work. Doing it twice, once for their own users and again for the benefit of those whose only practical effect is to fragment the ecosystem, is a substantial burden.
> playing whack-a-mole with rebuilders
Are they playing whack-a-mole?
Or was this one change that people are arguing (and Red Hat's lawyers seem to think) is within their rights under the GPL ?
It will be whack-a-mole if Red Hat tries to stop supporting VPS instances or stop updating UBI, both of a 1% chance of going away.
More work that has little effect on the actual upstream ecosystem beyond giving out something for free that 20k people at Red Hat are literally paid for. Ubuntu is not a clone of Debian, they extend it, tweak it, provide the code back to the community. What is the specific parts of the work that Rocky does that benefits the open-source community? What improvements has the community benefited from through your "work"?
We already _do_ a lot of work. This is _more_ work.