The problem with Red Hat is that they sell a brand, not a product, and while many Red Hat employees are allowed to work on open-source stuff, there's no competition, no room for second place, no market. Unless you have a community of enthusiasts, like Debian of course, which is also technically superior in some ways, but those people don't see any direct earnings for their contribution.
Sorry, I have no clue what are you talking about. Can you elaborate? What /is/ the problem with RH?
You know that RH employees actually work on OSS, right? They're a major contributor to the open-source world, they have a community of enthusiasts (Fedora) and everything goes to upstream.
Look, I'm not questioning their contributions, just the current state of affairs.
If Red Hat vanished tomorrow, Linux would still be developed and maintained, even though it would suffer a setback. That's because there are many other companies and communities that help with that.
The problem is that only Red Hat earns serious money directly from selling Linux licenses, although it relies on contributions of many other companies and individuals to do so. The other companies only earn money from complementary products and consulting services ... services which don't scale unless you're a superstar developer charging $500 / hour or you have lots of resources to hire lots of people to answer support calls.
Although they shouldn't care since they are a company, and I do appreciate their contributions, the culprit is from my pov the GPL license ... and the perfect open-source license is LGPL-like ... that's all I tried to say.
The various flavors of Enterprise Linux are products. Since Red Hat provides paid support for Enterprise Linux, they have every incentive to make sure core Linux functionality is as stable and efficient to manage as possible.
You might say they don't want to streamline themselves out of a job, but there will always be demand for supported versions of Linux, no matter how easy it is to administer.
Another reason for RH to make sure Linux rocks is off course increasing the total mind share for Linux, for the more installations and applications there are, the better the prospectives.
