What RedHat provides is an enormous development effort and an extremely long lived LTS platform. That doesn't come for free.
Many seem to want RHEL for free, but there are free alternatives. You can run: Debian, Ubuntu or Slackware, if the cost is such a huge issue.
I won't argue that RedHat has handled the change to CentOS in a good way, they clearly haven't. On the other hand I don't free sorry for those companies how want all the benefits provided by RedHat, but not pay to keeping RedHat in business. Open source isn't about free, it's about giving you the option to make changes to the code yourself, or pay others to do it for you. RedHat would like to get paid for their work, if you don't want to do that, that's fine to, but then you need to do the work yourself.
There has been a freely downloadable Red Hat available for the past 20 years, either in the form of CentOS, or before it good old classic Red Hat Linux. That got them this far, where they are now. So you can understand how people feel bit miffed, especially now that they have Big Blue backing them they should be financially more stable than before.
I can certainly understand people being "miffed", but that was a risk when choosing to base your infrastructure on RedHat. Again the handling was extremely poor. Had they announced this new program along with the changes to CentOS, I don't think as many would have been upset.
But gambling that a for profit company will always provide you with a free alternative to they commercial offering is a calculated risk. In this case it might not have paid of.
I mean although this sounds like an absolutely outlandish ask for a company this was very literally what we had with CentOS so I'm surprised at all the comments saying it's impossible.
