In terms of timeline, you are right. However, I think that change was pretty obviously a continuation of Red Hat’s strategy. No IBM meddling required in my view.

You could also state the situation quite differently.

First, you could point out that Red Hat announced a developer license that offered up to 16 installations of RHEL for free. Press releases at the time quoted Red Hat execs saying they were not interested in going after users of “just a few servers”. Many of the users of CentOS at the time could have migrated to the real thing for free. These programs have only expanded. You can use Podman, Docker, or Distrobox to create an unlimited number of official RHEL instances without any commercial restriction.

Second, Red Hat founded the CenttOS Stream project, moving their active development much more into the open. They shifted significant investment into this project. All the explanations at the time were about streamlining the development and engineering process.

Third, Red Hat has increased the amount of GPL code they have contributed since then and started several new wildly popular projects all licensed under the GPL.

Forth, they continued to explicitly and openly publish (for many years) all the input assets that CentOS was built from. This is how so many CentOS replacements were able to so quickly appear (Rocky, Scientific-now Alma, etc). IBM stopped directly paying for CentOS but did very little to kill it beyond that.

If you were paying attention to any of the above, you may have missed a dramatic shift in behaviour and values resulting from the IBM acquisition.

It does seem that IBM may be asserting themselves more now. That said, it is worth noting that they are only assimilating support services (legal, finance, Ops, IT, HR). The engineering and product teams (and their leadership) remain independent. Optimistically, this will not impact the Red Hat technology or community strategy. This is all pretty standard “economy of scale” stuff aimed at saving a bit of money on duplicated infrastructure. No immediate cause for alarm that it indicates a shift in strategy or even a desire for greater control by IBM corporate.

All that said, it is hard to imagine that departments like legal and HR reporting directly into IBM will not result cultural influence at Red Hat that will inevitably bleed into the product side. It will certainly change the experience of being a Red Hat employee.

I worry more about the unintended consequences. I am not a Red Hat customer. I do not use RHEL or Fedora. However, I recognize that Red Hat is the primary author of a lot of the software that I use. I do not even use GCC, Glibc, GNOME, or Systemd (all completely controlled by Red Hat) but I still rely on A LOT of their stuff.