But then aren't they themselves contributing to projects like Fedora and adding value to it in return ? I don't know anything but it seems that they are also contributing to the ecosystem. Plus it's not like we lacked free quality linux distros, do we ? If you feel like you are being taken adavantage of, what prevents you to contribute to say Debian instead ? I am learning programming and most students like me runnning linux don't run RHEL or CentOs and and frankly barely even know acknowledge their existence.

In general I think, if there is a package which is part of RHEL, there is an engineer working on it and contributes patches and is well versed in the code of it. Otherwise if there is a bug reported by paying customer, they won't be able to fix it. Opening a bug against any of supported Red Hat products by paying customers have consequences and it isn't like a bug on gnome or kde that goes unanswered/unresolved for years.

But RHEL by default doesn't have as many packages as Debian or even Fedora. See recent announcement about LibreOffice. Red hat can't by default ship a package that it can't fix and support.

RHEL is only a couple of thousand packages, and yes Red Hat absolutely does contribute to many, many packages that we use. Probably not every single one, but most of them and most definitely every one that needs fixes. The principle is called "upstream first".

> The principle is called "upstream first".

This really is the Only Sane Way To Go, as you don’t want to support your patches forever. And reapply them on every release.

It's not the way Canonical works though, so it's a clear line between what Red Hat does and what Canonical does. (SUSE is upstream first)

Canonical is a very idiosyncratic company. They mostly tend to do their own stuff their own way (like snaps), sometimes they make something incredible (such as Launchpad), and then mismanage it into irrelevance.

Eventually they'll get it right.