[zxzax]

I'm not sure what you mean, the paid people are still volunteering. They don't really have to spend company time upstreaming anything, they could technically keep all their patches in a private fork, but the company allows them to upstream things because it makes the most sense. You also don't have to leave it, you can also make a private fork too, and work on it slowly, if it makes the most sense to you.

These complaints about Red Hat are what make no sense to me, if you believe they are "eating Linux" for the worse then I would advise you to produce a version of Linux with all of the Red Hat commits removed, and see for yourself if it's more stable and polished. It may not be, because you would likely also be removing a lot of the bug fixes they upstream.