Free (libre) software replacements for proprietary software

The FSF recommends the GPL and its related licenses for that very reason, to protect against corpos misusing it and attempting to make their work proprietary. Ansible is so widely adopted in the IT world, that even if Red Hat tried to restrict it or otherwise lock it down, there would be multiple GPL forks supported by hundreds of devs popping up overnight.

That very scenario just happened earlier this year with RHEL, and we saw both Alma Linux and Rocky Linux spring into action to protect their respective users successfully.

You should specify more details in your post, Chef and Puppet are the most common alternatives to Ansible. They are both open source, but are Apache 2, not GPL, so not as good from a free software perspective.

I don't know of any other automation frameworks like those that adhere to your requirements. It depends on what you are using Ansible for though. If you just want a way to automatically trigger simple endpoint tasks, like cache cleaning, package updates, etc. You could just set up some kind of standard cron job template for your endpoints and have them report success or failure via a common log file on some shared resource.

If you're looking for more sophisticated endpoint management, you're probably out of luck if you aren't interested in using Ansible.