To be clear, you're less likely to get stuck like that. There's plenty of bugs open that Red Hat doesn't fix because it's either too problematic or affects too few people. Sometimes that's eventually solved with a point release and them rebasing to a newer package version which includes an upstream fix, sometimes it just persists. I'm not saying it's common, but it's happened, and happened to us. Encountering a bug and finding the KB article with only workarounds and then a bugzilla entry that's been open for a couple years isn't exactly common, but I also wouldn't count it as all that rare in my experience.
Also to be clear, I wasn't making a case abovc that Red Hat doesn't provide a lot of benefit to the open source community, just that Red Hat could not exist without that same community. I do not begrudge Red Hat making money. I do think they're being extremely shortsighted if and when they shut off the larger open source community's uses of their core OS product. They're making their whole ecosystem much harder to get talent for if they do that, and it's not like entities running Rocky or Alma are just going to spring for RHEL. We trade on our staff's skill as System/Linux Administrators, and the core OS is not as important as all that. It's like if Python started requiring licensing fees. You'd get some short term return on that and some larger entities will just pay, but you'd see python usage in the general community plummet, with all that entails about its future.
Maybe to their eyes it makes more sense in this current world of startups and VC to just exclude the smaller players, since those companies that grow organically to a size where Red Hat's pricing makes sense are much rarer?
Also to be clear, I wasn't making a case abovc that Red Hat doesn't provide a lot of benefit to the open source community, just that Red Hat could not exist without that same community. I do not begrudge Red Hat making money. I do think they're being extremely shortsighted if and when they shut off the larger open source community's uses of their core OS product. They're making their whole ecosystem much harder to get talent for if they do that, and it's not like entities running Rocky or Alma are just going to spring for RHEL. We trade on our staff's skill as System/Linux Administrators, and the core OS is not as important as all that. It's like if Python started requiring licensing fees. You'd get some short term return on that and some larger entities will just pay, but you'd see python usage in the general community plummet, with all that entails about its future.
Maybe to their eyes it makes more sense in this current world of startups and VC to just exclude the smaller players, since those companies that grow organically to a size where Red Hat's pricing makes sense are much rarer?