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.
Apart from RHEL, RedHat contributes to hundreds of FOSS projects and hires a lot of FOSS devs. So their contribution in progressing the desktop linux is huge. You can see the contributions to the various project here: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions
Believe it or not corporates play a big role in making Linux what it is and their enshittification is bad for Linux ecosystem.
Sad that RedHat went this way.
They don’t do this because they like the idea of free software (as recently proven - again) but because of thy need the software and doing it like this is the easiest way.
Same with Microsoft, for example. I’m still not going to use any of their software just because they support FOSS they need because it’s easier this way.
Of course they need the software and that’s why they contribute to make it better. That’s how most of the FOSS development works anyway. People have an ‘itch’ to fix the issues or add a feature and they do it and the license makes sure that others benefit from that itch.