Redhat abstained instead of saying No. Few weeks back they dumped their home grown Ceylon language on to Eclipse foundation. Seems like they are going to stick with Java even if unwillingly.
A few years ago, all the hip kids were making JVM languages that were "Better" and "More Productive". Ceylon was just a few Redhat employees attempt at chasing market trends.
Kotlin was designed from the ground up to work seamlessly with IDE IntelliJ (and hence Android Studio), whereas Ceylon joining the Eclipse Foundation was just an afterthought and its Eclipse IDE integration isn't guaranteed to be great.
Well, I don't know about better, Ceylon is just a different approach. There are some things Ceylon does that I like better than Kotlin, and vice versa. Both are certainly better than Java though.
Ceylon has two things that Kotlin should have IMO, a better type system, where are my union types and intersection types ? :) and a real specification.
I notice the name of Ceylon has changed to Eclipse Ceylon [1], in the same way Groovy became Apache Groovy when it joined the Apache foundation 2 years ago.