On Thu, 31 Mar 2011, Lamar Owen wrote:
The kernel source package's pre-patched source code tarball is a much larger hurdle, not for just rebuilding the package, but for modifying and properly (commercially) supporting those packages.
Not only a hurdle for commercial competitors, there were people (like me) tracking the RHEL kernel builds between releases. In the past they were available (they still are for RHEL5, but have been removed for RHEL6) so this move impacts everyone interested in testing those kernel releases or relied on them for certain hardware support or bugfix.
I don't know that if you have Red Hat support you can still access these releases, but they were quite useful to CentOS users as well.
References:
http://people.redhat.com/jwilson/el5/ http://people.redhat.com/arozansk/el6/