I wouldn't be surprised if this means that another project will crop up soon-ish which does what CentOS did before, rebuild RHEL so there is a stable, boring distribution for people who want RHEL without wanting or being able to pay RH.
Even some who don't mind commercial will. Oracle has a well-earned reputation of being difficult in licensing negotiations (there was even a Gartner piece on it at some point)... And what they did with the JDK just underscored that.
Wasn't CentOS "adopted" by RedHat because no one else really wanted to do the work?
A revived Scientific Linux could easy suffer the same fate. No one truly want to maintain a RedHat clone for little to no pay, while at the same time dealing request and complaints from companies who wants the benefits of RHEL, but no pay for the development and maintenance works done by RedHat.
Realistically it's some bean counter at IBM who asked why RedHat is giving away the very same thing they're trying to sell. Said bean counter do have a point in my opinion.