Those are probably the users that RedHat is trying to nudge onto RHEL. "Enterprise" software is normally quite expensive, so the marginal cost of some RHEL Server licenses is probably a small fraction of the total cost of deploying the software in most cases.

More generally, orgs that are running "Enterprise" software are already set up to pay for software. Going from spending $X to spending $X+Y is often not a big deal ("Ok, I'll run that through the same process I used to get approval for buying FooSoftWorks"), while going from $0 to $Y can be very hard ("I don't even know who I'd need to ask to get purchase approval for that").

> Going from spending $X to spending $X+Y is often not a big deal

Except when $Y == $1000X. Then it really is a big deal.

When you only have a tiny minority of RHEL hosts that you have full support contracts on, and an overwhelming majority of CentOS hosts that you administer in-house, it really isn't trivial.

It's almost certainly cheaper to migrate to Oracle or Rocky. Migrations aren't cheap either.

> More generally, orgs that are running "Enterprise" software are already set up to pay for software.

Crucially, though, most entities who are running their own "enterprise" software deployments will need way more than 16 servers.

Small shops do use "enterprise" software, of course, but they usually just pay somebody else to run it for them.