That's an absurd generalization. They contribute upstream. They aren't forking every project and keeping changes for themselves and customers. Just the sheer amount of development and testing RedHat puts into the kernel alone, funded by RHEL, should be sufficient to disprove this argument.

There's nuance here. TFA has a legit complaint that supporting RHEL puts extra hassle on you as an open source contributor. RedHat is also fully in their right to strictly adhere to the license of the software they distribute.

Supporting RHEL as a distribution for your software means access to users on that distribution. That might mean nothing, but that depends from project to project. For the article's author that has little worth and that's a cost-benefit analysis for him. That might not be the case for other projects.

Isn’t this kind of what the RHEL clones were doing? Taking a snapshot of RHEL and then repackaging it, and in the case of Rocky Linux selling support. All without actually making any contributions back to the community. Almalinux actually contributes patches so I feel they will end up coming to an agreement with Red Hat but the likes of Rocky Linux seemed to be largely exploitive. Red Hat seems to be saying “hey you can have the code but we aren’t going to make the distribution for you. Here is a link to Stream feel free to make your own distribution”

Are you aware the amount that Red Hat contributes to the kernel? Red Hat has more contributions to the upstream linux kernel (which every distro benefits from, RHEL or not) than just about any other corporation. The amount of testing and stability effort that goes into the kernel would be dramatically reduced without Red Hat, not to mention the code changes themselves.

Just to get a basic idea, [1] has some stats of kernel contributions for the 4.20 kernel, Red Hat had second most changesets accepted. Intel was first, although if you combined Red Hat + IBM then that would push Intel to second. And looking at the core kernel commits (ie ignoring things like device drivers, where hardware companies are making contributions solely for the purpose of supporting the hardware that they sell), the difference was even more skewed towards Red Hat (and interestingly, IBM as well).

And that's just the kernel itself, they're also the primary force behind plenty of other widely used projects (fedora is one of my favorite distros, systemd, for better or worse, it's still used by most distros, and as much as people like to hate on gnome, I have to say I've found it more stable and worry free compared to other options including modern KDE, and the list goes on). Maybe they are not the perfect role model but don't pretend they aren't giving a bunch back to the entire community in many ways.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/

Not being able to test conveniently is enough of a reason. The guy did free work for their platform.