lalatendum

RH was under time pressure to announce the CentOS 8 EOL dates. Because we did not want more people to move to CentOS 8 during the holidays. The programs weren't ready and we felt it was important to get the CentOS Linux announcement out as soon as possible. We had many long discussions about this in the Red Hat internal memolist when CentOS news were announced. Please search the internet for Red Hat's memolist. It takes a lot of time to come up with free programs like this, thats the simple truth. You can choose not to believe this and wait for few years to see how these turns out. It is not about immediate revenue growth but how to make RHEL evolve as the next generation OS. If RHEL does not change it will be become obsolete sooner or later.

I have been a Red hat employee for more than 8 years and we never ever intentionally made projects difficult to consume by users outside of RH. More people using the open source projects works better for us as it provides free mind share, testing and feedback. For RH selling subscription for a popular/stable open source project is a way easier problem than a project which has no mind share. That being said sometimes it is very difficult to maintain projects and branches for external contribution depending upon the scope of project and the development workflow we use for it. It is very common scene in open source projects where contributors does not maintain the documentation etc properly for easy on boarding. I can go on for long time why it is not easy to do and we should improve on it for sure.

That's the side effect of a company getting bigger. When a company hires a lot more and trying expand it is very hard hire only upstream contributors.