Further to that my memory was that Redhat was always a paid version of Linux from the initial release and only later changed. I am not even sure if the Source code back then was open or closed?
Nope. I was a RH fan/user going back to the early 90's. I still have a boxed copy of RH v3 on floppy disks. Before that I installed RH by downloading from their FTP site (actually doing an FTP install, where you downloaded a small bootstrap installer that then pulled all the packages from FTP). Initially there was no such thing as a Red Hat "Enterprise" version -- the boxed version was just a convenience offering that included some minimal installation support, and was their first foray into monetizing the platform. I started buying those boxed copies not because I needed them, but to expressly support their efforts. Well that and FTP bandwidth at the time was minimal, LOL. I think they were like $50-$80 for a boxed copy, so not a big investment.
Years later they commercialized the Enterprise version that included hardening and added management features not included in the upstream free codebase, along with support contracts. Some years later they formally split RHEL from upstream by rebranding upstream as Fedora. The GPL required they still make upstream sources available, which allowed distributions like CentOS to essentially be a clone of RHEL, but it had to be stripped of all RH branding, logos, and added features.
Soapbox time...
The company I work for (been here since March 1994) became a commercial RHEL customer in the late 90's or early 00's, and we were very happy with the enterprise support we received. For years I managed our corporate relationship with RH and was their biggest evangelist here. I was largely responsible for not only expanding the use of RHEL over Windows servers, but also bringing in additional RH products (OpenShift, JBoss EAP, RH SSO, Data Virtualization, etc.). We were very happy with their pricing and terms for many years, and they were my provider of choice when we had a need -- my default position when a business need was articulated was "can RH provide this?" I attended many Red Hat Summit conferences in Boston, and was the conference I most looked forward to. We were spending well over $1M/year with Red Hat for years, which is nothing compared with, say, IBM spend, but was a lot for the time for what amounted to a support contract around open-source software.
Speaking of IBM, our company had long been an IBM customer and (unlike RH at the time) we had a very strained relationship with them. We were a large IBM mainframe shop (and still are, but are actively migrating off of it), and they knew they had us bent over a barrel with few if any options, so they constantly bullied us on pricing as we were essentially a captive customer. Once they surprise audited us and "fined" us over $300K for an admittedly poorly managed WebSphere deployment where we over-deployed (IBM had no licensing mechanism in place, so if you didn't account carefully, it was too easy to deploy more than you were paying for). No friendly conversation to "true up" going forward, which is something other vendors commonly do in this situation. It was very much a threat to "pay up or go to court" situation. Not to mention the horrible code and software quality of many of the off-mainframe software (WebSphere, DB2, various vertical business apps). So we generally despised IBM. We have a similar hate-hate relationship with Oracle, I'll add. Red Hat was always a pleasant supplier to work with, by comparison to those two.
Then about 6-12 months prior to the IBM acquisition of RH being announced, we started noticing a decline in RH's support quality, code quality (lots of bugs and performance issues, that RH wasn't much help with), and prices started dramatically going up. The final straw was a nearly 2x increase in our 3-year subscription renewal, just to maintain what we had. No joke: Late one week (Thursday or Friday) I was on the phone venting with our RH "customer advocate" rep responsible for our account, and I mentioned to her that RH was starting to look and smell a LOT like IBM. That weekend, a couple of days later, the IBM acquisition was announced. She called me the following week asking me if I had insider information, because the rank-and-file RH employees had no knowledge until it was announced.
They promised that they would continue to be run as an independent company and that IBM would not be changing their business model and practices. Yeah, sure. We'd already seen the "IBM-ization" for months leading up to it. If IBM was not directly influencing their practices, RH was positioning themselves as an attractive acquisition for a company like IBM by aligning themselves with those practices.
We drastically reduced our RH footprint as a result, renewing only the necessary RHEL support subscriptions and moving away from all the other RH software I mentioned. We're actively looking to replace RHEL with something like Ubuntu Enterprise to get them out completely. I've now gone from being their biggest evangelist to their biggest detractor, because I feel they've betrayed their open source roots and their long-term loyal enterprise customers.
All that to say, this latest news just confirms my sentiment towards them.