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.
A lot of big companies use RHEL because they are afraid of FOSS and assume that paying for something is better than getting the same thing for free. I’ve spoken with people in my org who have a RHEL contract, and it always sounds like the RH people never tell them anything that anyone who knows Linux couldn’t have told you.
From a corporate POV it gives you a whipping boy to expose when the boss starts yelling. Pointing at an internet rando won’t suffice, even if the info is identical.