You’re begging the question by assuming Microsoft’s market position hasn’t been artificially inflated with anti-competitive measures.

When you already have a dominant position in one market – say, office productivity software or operating systems – leveraging it to push another product below cost to effectively take over another market actually would (and in the past, literally has) put MS in hot water with US antitrust regulators, so it’s not that hard to imagine that, depending on how they did it, this might also run afoul of antitrust regulations.

The crux here would seem to be whether MS is really “hiding the true cost of Teams from enterprise customers.” They’re likely breaking the law if they are.

Yeah, although there are limits to what they can do. Like you said, they can only make it so difficult before it stops being worth it to customers. If they make it too risky/complicated/inconvenient for cloud customers to use RHEL, they won’t lol.

I’m pretty sure if they revoked access to source repos for valid RHEL installations – therefore cloud VM’s rented from someone with a subscription – then a lot of customers’ workflows would break. The tooling to quickly patch and rebuild packages is part of the appeal of RHEL and source repos are a big part of that.

I could see them putting pressure on cloud VM providers to maintain control here – while I think Rocky’s GPL interpretation is in the clear here, Red Hat can (apparently) still punish customers who redistribute sources via the EULA.

Clever workaround! But if Red Hat is really coming after source redistribution then it’s only a matter of time before they’ll find some end-run around this.