I’m not trying to defend Red Hat. I have my own opinions (some of which are below) about their practices, products, and platforms. But, Red Hat is “Enterprise” Linux. I know of very few enterprises looking for advanced kernel features or even using docker to begin with. It turns out Enterprises want the old, stable, and predictable nature of RHEL.

I’m pretty sure Red Hat designed software collections to solve problems around your exact complaints of old versions of products. If you want a new version of python or ruby just install the scl. Want to provide a custom version of gcc? Build an scl and ship it to your RHEL customers. Yes it’s more work, but it’s possible and provided and supported from Red Hat.

Red Hat has been VERY active in upstream projects. Last I checked they were the #2 organization contributing code to docker AND kubernetes and last year they were #3 for upstream kernel development. Ubuntu is notorious for not contributing upstream (may be biased from the reports) and CoreOS does a lot of great things but is far too small to contribute on a scale that Red Hat, IBM, and Microsoft can.

I don’t understand how making out-of-date, stable software means they treat you like you don’t know what’s running on your system. They have done a great job at making Linux adoption mainstream in business and making very advanced technologies manageable and supportable for enterprise scale (very different from web scale).

I have utmost respect for what Red Hat has done for open source and is doing for the broader Linux community. There are many smart people there who have personally helped me with and without support contracts.