I see all the drama around Red-hat and I still don’t get why companies would use RHEL (or centos when it existed). I was in many companies and CentOS being years behind was awful for any recent application (GPU acceleration, even new CPU had problems with old Linux kernels shipped in CentOS).
Long story short the only time one of the company I worked in considered CentOS it was ditched out due to many problems and not even being devs/researchers friendly.
I hear a lot of Youtube influencers “talking” (or reading the Red-Hat statements) about all the work Red-Hat is doing but I don’t see any. I know I dislike gnome so I don’t care they contribute to that.
What I see though is a philosophy against FOSS. They even did a Microsoft move with CentOS (Embrace, extend, and extinguish). I see corporate not liking sharing and collaborating together but aiming at feeding of technology built as a collective. I am convinced they would love to patent science discovery too. I am pretty sure there is a deep gap in philosophy between people wanting “business-grade” Linux and FOSS community.
If you have concrete examples of Red-Hat added value that cannot be fulfilled by independent experts or FOSS community, I’d really like to hear that.
They’re a pretty big contributor to Linux, so even if you don’t see their work you’re probably using it anyway. https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
Wrong question IMO. It’s more relevant to ask “without Red Hat, would independent experts or the FOSS community have added the same value?”. Sure, it’s possible that Red Hat has some highly skilled developers that possess unique skills required for their contributions, but in general contributing to FOSS projects is more about willingness to spend large amounts of time and resources on something that doesn’t give you money in return.
Lots of large companies “could” have spent thousands of hours contributing to Linux, but unless they actually do it then it is irrelevant.