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.
One example would be HDR, here and here are two articles I found after a quick search. I’m no dev, but I know HDR is a complicated beast and more importantly not critical infrastructure so community developments are slow or non-existant. If you check who has been contributing to HDR it’s always big corps like Red Hat, AMD and Valve.