I don't know... could be they rename it but I don't now if the community would support it then, because in that case it might be free but not really open source, unless I'm mistaken.
And that doesn't make a lot of sense to me
Not? Think commercially. Why have people start with free hosting at a certain time? Commercial interest. If you have the customer with you, the more chance he will upgrade.
Same with Cloudlinux. If you already have a free Cloudlinux, so you probably also get the php chooser with all the options which Cloudlinux give to be used with php (the modules and addons), but as stated, no HardenedPHP, that will annoy at a certain time.
And everytime people run into issues because they have to upgrade PHP and remove older versions because not having the hardenedphp. A customer then chooses a pro version a lot faster than if he's running a "separate" OS. Because the customer is already tied with Cloudlinux.
To me that would make sense as a commercial thought.
If it would be a good thing...... that's another question. But well we have to wait and see what happens anyway, what will Alma do, Rocky, Oracle.
They should wait to long or they will loose loads of people to Debian and alikes.