SiliconAngle's Paul Gillin wrote that while there had been outrage in certain circles, the observers he had contacted were mostly sympathetic to Red Hat.

However, some of the companies he cited as offering support to Red Hat have little connection to open source, like Josh Amishav, founder and chief executive of the data breach monitoring firm, Breachsense.

Another company, venture capital firm, TSVC Management, was also quoted, with its general partner Spencer Greene attempting to play down the importance of the GNU Project as it was founded 40 years ago.

Greene said the world had changed since the GNU Project was founded. Linux is released under the GNU General Public Licence version 2 which follows a share-and-share-alike policy.

Also cited was Joe Brockmeier, a long-time fixture in the open-source community and currently the community manager at Percona, who backed Red Hat in its bid to restrain others from gaining access to the RHEL source code.

Red Hat, which was bought by IBM in 2019, said in an announcement on 21 June that RHEL source code would be available only to paying customers.

While source code could also be obtained from CentOS Stream, it would not be the same as in an RHEL release as it was an upstream environment. And Fedora, Red Hat's community distribution, would be even more outdated as it would be upstream to CentOS Stream.

Brockmeier, who has worked for both Red Hat and SUSE, took a potshot at SUSE, saying, “Companies are trying to claim they’re more open than Red Hat to capitalise on the anger being directed at Red Hat.”

SUSE, the biggest independent open source vendor, said on 11 July that it would invest more than US$10 million (A$14.97 million) to fork the publicly available RHEL source code and make it available with no restrictions.