[amorousf00p]

I'd agree with you that RH is creating a closed ecosystem and many of the ideas in RH land are not in the best tradition of open source software and not good for a healthy community.

But... Slow moving can be another way to say 'proven' and who is out there deciding what should be deprecated if it isn't the big companies like RH? Is that the cultural 'rut' you refer to? That things don't move fast enough? If that is it I disagree. Most of the 'innovation' I've seen in software is wrapping old ideas for a new generation.

[zapita]

I completely agree that sometimes slowing down the pace of upgrades is the responsible thing to do, especially on mission-critical systems. But Red Hat is not the most authoritative or trustworthy source of information on that topic, because 1) they don’t actually build and operate enterprise systems themselves, their customers do; 2) they have an incentive to make their slow-moving proprietary forks look more useful than they actually are, 3) they have a track record of trying to make upstream less reliable and secure than it actually is, again with the goal of making their offering seem more needed.

My comment on “cultural rut” was unrelated. I was referring to the lack of diversity in the open-source community, and the difficulty in moving past the myths and closed-club mentality of 1960s US academia. Open-source is still primarily the playground of privileged, insecure, passive-agressive white males cargo-culting the behavior of their predecessors, but it could be so much more.