Having data means nothing if you can’t monetize it.

As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.

And they’ve been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.

To be fair, there are (or were) lots of distros downstream of RHEL marketing themselves as drop-in replacements, not just Oracle. And this move isn’t likely to stop Oracle (and the rest), only make the transition experience less smooth for clients (ultimately all the downstream distros can just rebase off of CentOS Stream instead; they lose “bug for bug” compatibility, but will still largely be drop-in replacements).

I also find it hard to muster any sympathy for IBM of all people, even when their opponent is Oracle (who are the lowest of the low).

We can’t immediately convert all cars to EV, we don’t have the grid capacity or enough charging stations, yet.

Well sure, but there’s no suggestion of converting “all cars” to EVs “immediately”. Even if ICE cars were banned for new sales tomorrow, it’d still take a decade and more for the existing rolling stock to gradually be replaced by new vehicles.

A 10 year period for utility companies to gradually upgrade their infrastructure doesn’t sound desperately unrealistic.