It cannot change because of how copyright works. If you mean dropping CentOS Stream, that of course can happen but then all the Alma Linux folks have to do is go back to how CentOS was developed in 2010.
It's also not that Red Hat saw something wrong with CentOS Linux. To put it simply, between 2014 and 2019 Red Hat learnt that the company needed a free RHEL upstream more than they needed a free RHEL downstream. CentOS Stream is all about sharing participation to the CentOS community so that everybody does what they need and they don't have to ask mom Red Hat. Just read https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/09/centos_stream_greg_ku... ("Greg Kurtzer: Red Hat did the right thing and the new scenario is better than the old").
In fact, a lot of effort went towards making it possible to ship RHEL's upstream as a rolling release. Consider that ten years ago you had to ask specifically, months in advance, about updating a package in a RHEL minor release. In 2010, a quality engineer and I spent a few weeks working on grep just to make sure that the bugs were fixed in Fedora before RHEL 6 forked, because otherwise we'd be stuck with those bugs for years. These days I could just open a merge request on CentOS Stream and ask to update to a newer version of grep.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, but not as a spokesperson
I may be off, but hey. As I understood it at the time, the reason wasn’t “OMG there are folks not paying us for the bits” but rather “we have this number of engineers, they can work either on CentOS Linux or on Stream” and Stream is more of a benefit to Red Hat as an upstream for RHEL.
