> But as we all know, RHEL/IBM only wants to take free labor and not really give back these days :(
Ludicrous. Red Hat and IBM are far from perfect, but they are absolute heroes for open source. Listing all the projects that Red Hat pays to develop would be very difficult because it's so long. They've even acquired proprietary companies and open sourced their products (while the product was still selling and highly useful!), something virtually nobody does.
Sure, they likely could. But then the complaint would be, "Arrg, I can't believe Freedesktop.org and Alpine are now effectively owned by Red Hat/IBM now, arrg!"
Also, Red Hat typically only "sponsors" open source projects that they have some business dependency on. Freedesktop.org might be a good candidate, but Alpine could be harder to justify. I don't know of any RH product that uses Alpine directly. (Most enterprises only have exposure to Alpine through container images.)
Redhat, Canonical, IBM, Oracle, Google, hell even Microsoft... There are a bunch of big actors in the Linux space that could and probably should be financing this. Also there's the Linux Foundation that is made for financing Linux projects.
Red Hat's gambit has always been to hire engineers to do good work on Linux broadly, in many areas. As opposed to just dropping crates full of money at random on projects
Of course they still get tarred and feathered with the "Red Hat wants to control Linux!" brush because they...contribute the bulk of development to projects like GNOME
I've nothing against red hat and i love that an organization is doing work in the free software space. But it's a choice as an engineer if you want to devote your loss of salary to do honest work.
I do open source in my free time because my family can't sustain itself otherwise. Kudos to all the devs out there working on open software.
RHEL benefits from freedesktop and X, and as a show of good faith they could support Alpine too.
But as we all know, RHEL/IBM only wants to take free labor and not really give back these days :(