Why should that be a problem if you use the official repo, handled by MongoDB themselves?
Let's say you're using version 1.1 of some software and you're hit by a remotely exploitable unauthenticated RCE.
You want to patch it, but the vendor says that the only fix is to update to 2.0.
How quickly can you adjust your software to work with that major release that might contain non-backwards compatible changes? Are you going to be quicker than the time it takes malware authors to write bots to hit that RCE?
There's also a second example which is automated updates: Our infrastructure automatically applies OS package updates via `apt-get`.
Thanks to Debian only ever updating packages for security reasons and only very rarely shipping new bugs, this is an actually workable practice.
But once you start adding 3rd party vendors who, for example, believe that once puppet 4 is released it's totally safe to just publish puppet 4 as a replacement of puppet 3 previously in the 3rd party repo, this becomes a very dangerous practice.
Do RedHat support engineers get tickets like 'bug in the energy minimisation algorithm of GraphViz - go in, learn that field of computer science, and fix it'?
So if you have a bug in a RedHat package, and you're paying $100k a year RedHat support contract, all they really do is open a GH issue with the upstream to ask them to fix it? And then you just wait hoping they fix it so RedHat can cherry pick it?
Rumor has it that KMS[1] was developed entirely because a deep-pocketed RH customer was annoyed that their workstations showed a fraction of a second of the boot/init log, and wanted a more seamlessly-graphical boot.
This feature was not universally welcomed by the kernel community. It excluded BSD cousins and frustrated nVidia and AMD/ATI. I remember standing next to the DRM/KMS maintainer while Linus yelled at us.
RH absolutely will interact with upstream on behalf of their customers. They don't just "open a GH issue"; they present designs, code, rationale, and evidence to upstream. I wonder whether this is something that Oracle does, but it doesn't sound like it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager#Kerne...
Hopefully they still send patches upstream to the original projects.
I happen to be in the latter position. Developers at both my employer and my previous employers generally cannot just install whatever they want, mostly for longevity/support reasons (at my current employer there's a way for developers to import outside code into the monorepo, which means just this week I'm cleaning up Node 0.10 and Go 1.3 from the monorepo...). They go through a team that builds them a system they can use. And that team strongly prefers to get software from our Linux distro than from third parties, because every single team has their own preferred third parties to get software from.
I do agree that for a shop that's running a single big web application with Mongo as the backend, they're probably installing it from upstream (and happier with that), but that's not the only use case.
now they'll be forced to also have one with mongodb (if their deployment is critical enough to already have red hat support they'll probably just caugh up the money)