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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
RedHat contributes to hundreds of FOSS projects and hires a lot of FOSS devs.
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.
corporates play a big role in making Linux what it is
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.
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.
The two major benefits of RedHat seem to be:
Now LTS is provided by others but the support isn't always there. A lot of enterprises like the support as sort of an insurance if they lose their experts.
Personally I don't agree with enterprises that think that way, but it is the reason it has stuck around so long.
You can add support contract requirements for some pieces of software coming from vendors with so little confidence in their product that they're rather have it run on an outdated dependencies environnement. A side effect of the logic you talked about, applied to software vendors.
I worked for a bank. When they decided to deploy Linux on their infrastructure, they chose RHEL and they have signed a big contract with RedHat for tech support.
Overall, they chose RedHat for the same reason they chose Microsoft before: tech support. They have >10000 engineers, and yet somehow they think they absolutely need tech support... They pay a lot for it. In my building, they even got a Microsoft engineer once a week on-site until Covid. I don't know for the other people working for this bank, but I asked for Microsoft support only once in 2 years. In the end, their guy sent me back an email telling me "I've transmitted your question to the corresponding engineering team" and .. diddlysquat.
Now to be fair, for paying customers, RHEL and Microsoft both ensure security updates for a really a long time. Red Hat pays a lot of people to backport security patches from upstream to previous versions. It allows companies like the bank I worked for to keep running completely crappy and obsolete software for an insane amount of time without having to worry too much about security vulnerabilities.
Anyway regarding RedHat contributions, a lot of them are subtle.
This list is far from exhaustive. I'm sure they have paid for a lot of other things you're using daily without knowing it.
VFX studios have been using CentOS and Red Hat for decades. I don't know why exactly but my understanding is that it's more reliable, stable, and with better support than other distributions. I don't speak from personal experience, so these reasons might be wrong, but I'm certain there is a strong preference for RHEL in the industry.
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/
added value that cannot be fulfilled by independent experts or FOSS community
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.
CentOS being years behind was awful
You're not doing it right. There's absolutely a reason why enterprise linux works with a version that's more-or-less locked in place (but for security updates, like a maintenance fork). You need to understand the value you've been overlooking.
wget|sh bullshit? Now run this other set of commands to confirm your installation' -- but in our case is just 'rpm -qa|egrep' or even an snmpwalk.<<EOF construct into a vagrant config is just so easy, now, and gives the entire machine to play with.As someone who used to dev a notable app in the past, cross-distro problems alone made so many of the fringe OSes impossible to support, and so we didn't. EL was the backbone because we respected what we had.
I just can't figure out why this-week's-glitter is more important than losing the install/support/update/validate burden by choosing a stable platform to work within. Life's too short to support dependency hell or struggle just to replicate a failing setup in your lab for testing. Do you just not support customers?
I don't know anything about the drama but back in the day I was in DevOps and pretty much every engineering tool we had strongly urged us to run it on the RHEL family. Also it was kinda nice that there was a phone number to call when things were going to heck. Plus for some reason I could always get drivers to work faster on fedora, which might have been my knowledge base. Not sure
Also for a corporation a red hat license is pennies so for them just having official support is worth it.
For individuals I don't think it really serves any use.