Regardless whether Red Hat said it or not, why not call it what it is? Not every CentOS user was a freeloader and the same is true for its spiritual successors. However, a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community. Secondly, a substantial chunk of those users used CentOS because they wanted all the benefits of Red Hat EL without paying for it.
That pretty much sounds like freeloading to me. Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code. As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it's fine.
Red Hat puts enormous amounts of money in the FLOSS ecosystem, I think it's completely fair for them to nudge customers with deep-enough pockets to pay for subscriptions. For other users, there are plenty of other options.
[1] For non-copyleft licenses, Red Hat are of course not obliged to provide source code.
That pretty much sounds like freeloading to me. Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code. As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it's fine.
Red Hat puts enormous amounts of money in the FLOSS ecosystem, I think it's completely fair for them to nudge customers with deep-enough pockets to pay for subscriptions. For other users, there are plenty of other options.
[1] For non-copyleft licenses, Red Hat are of course not obliged to provide source code.