The last time the project leader measured it, only about 40% of Fedora contributors were known to be Red Hat employees. So while it's a big chunk, it's not a majority.

Simply reusing Red Hat’s source RPMs isn’t an open ecosystem. All the EL downstreams finally collaborating is.

Except the only thing they're collaborating on is obscured sharing of RHEL source RPMs to hide who is violating their subscription terms.

I have no love for oracle, but in general the only freeloaders in FOSS development are companies that use the work of a whole ecosystem of unpaid developers and then use loopholes to restrict access.

It's ludicrous to suggest that Red Hat, who funds more open source work than any other company, is "freeloading" just because you don't like their subscription terms. There are a lot of words to describe how you feel about those terms, but "freeloading" just ain't it.

“Lazy clones” are vital to maintaining the interoperability and openness that make RHEL (or any other corporate distro) attractive and keep them accountable for anticonsumer practices, preventing enshittification.

RHEL clones are not vital to RHEL interoperability or openness. They're not even relevant to these things. They may like to tell people they are, but it's bullshit. RHEL's interoperability comes from Red Hat's upstream first policy. Improvement made by Red Hat get pushed upstream, both to software projects (e.g. linux, gcc, httpd, etc.) and to distro projects (e.g. Fedora and CentOS). RHEL's openness is based on the fact that it is open source. RHEL clones could all disappear tomorrow and it won't affect these aspects of RHEL.

The value proposition has always been in the support and service ecosystem and infrastructure provided by the corporation.

Red Hat's value proposition isn't helpdesk style "support me when something breaks" support like you're suggesting here. It's not something that only exists during incidents. It's an ongoing relationship with the vendor that builds the platform that you're building your business on. It's being able to request and influence priority of features and bug fixes.

If they kill clones, they are killing the on-ramp and ecosystem that makes their paid offerings so dominant. Students will learn something else, developers would deprioritize rpm, making their paid products less attractive.

Clones going away wouldn't hurt the free on-ramp to RHEL because the free developer subscription exists now. It's a better on-ramp than a clone ever could be because it's actual RHEL, and includes additional products. People like students that don't need the exact product, just something close enough, can still use and learn on CentOS or Fedora. Developers aren't going to de-prioritize RPM any worse than they already do.