They were bought by IBM a few years back, but even aside from that they’re a corporation and they care about making money above all else.
It looks like Red Hat is doing its damnedest to consolidate as much power for themselves within the Linux ecosystem.
I don’t think the incessant Fedora shilling is unrelated.
It seems like there isn’t much criticism of the company or their tactics, and I’m curious if any of you think that should change.
I do not use any Red Hat distributions (not RHEL, not CentOS, not Fedora).
Red Hat is one of the largest contributors to glibc, gcc, GNU utils, systemd, ext4, Btrfs, SELinux, RPM, and GNOME. I generally try to avoid all those. However, I acknowledge that I am a heavy user of Red Hat software.
Red Hat is one of the largest contributors to Xorg, Wayland, Mesa, KVM, libvirt, dbus, podman, Pipewire, Cockpit, NetworkManager, and Flatpak. I use all of those a lot. Oh, and Red Hat has been one of the top 4 contributors to the Linux kernel for something like 20 years now. I use the Linux kernel.
If you want to avoid Red Hat software (something I see people claiming they do from time to time), you have to stay away from all the software listed on this page: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions
I am ok if people dislike Red Hat and want to avoid them. I am not a user. I am not a shareholder. However, I find it hard to ignore when people claim that they DO avoid Red Hat when I know that they are knee deep in software written by Red Hat. It also bugs me when people I doubt are contributing any code rant that Red Hat are freeloaders. I do not agree with all of Red Hat’s vision for Linux and do not love or all the ways the influence the Linux world. I do acknowledge their contributions and am thankful for the software that I use.