Again--incorrect. I was doing it at least 20 years ago.
For someone who claims to be some sort of tech manager, you are not very current on tech or its licenses.
Recall, if you will, that the GPLv2 (which was in force at the time), that all entities that distributed Linux/GNU software were required to make their code available. It overrides any commercial license that you are obviously thinking about.
Anyway, I was hoping you'd learn a thing or two in the ~20 years-ish since the OS wars. I am disappointed that you have not.
You’re being dishonest, bearing false witness on Red Hat’s historical business practices. The only completely free “code” they made available was uncompiled, which is completely impractical, for anyone to compile that code for each individual file on their own, and have a working O/S.
That’s exactly why CentOS was created, as you and anyone with any real knowledge on this subject would know - because you could NOT legally download the Red Hat O/S files without a support agreement. The most RH offered was a 30 day trial for free.
There’s countless articles out there like this one that are exposing what you are trying to cover up. Maybe you or a company you worked for had some special arrangement, but the average person had to pay to download and use Rad Hat for more than 30 days. Even now the terms of use are extremely limited.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/red-hat-31/want-to-download-rhel-5-a-624311/
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/where-do-i-download-red-hat-enterprise-linux/
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/where-to-get-redhat-enterprise-linux-installation-number/
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/red-hat-31/how-to-download-rhel-4-ws-337281/
https://superuser.com/questions/15602/is-there-a-free-as-in-money-version-of-redhat-linux
Etc…