[javitury]

RHEL market share won't last forever, so they have decided to milk the Red Hat cow as fast as they can.

Long term, people will switch to containers and cloud apps (Kubernetes, AWS). In this new environment, operating systems are commoditized and RHEL's moat will slowly shrink. Instead, developers will focus on alpine, debian or similar.

[time0ut]

My company is steadily moving from being a heavy RH shop (RHEL and OpenShift) to Amazon (Amazon Linux 2 and EKS) as we migrate from our colos to AWS. RH has been a good vendor and I have no complaints, but it makes little sense in the long run. I am sure they are feeling it.

[creatonez]

Red Hat has significant involvement in container platforms right now.

[javitury]

Those are different Red Hat products and belong to different layers of the cloud stack.

Previously third party developers targeted RHEL directly, enhancing the RHEL ecosystem. Red Hat could play long term by (indirectly) giving away the base product to the community, and profit from the increase in support subscriptions.

New projects don't target RHEL as often as their primary platform, they prefer containers now. There is less ecosystem enhancement and it's more profitable to milk existing RHEL users. Centos Stream makes it possible to smooth the transition to the new paradigm.

Openshift, Coreos, etc have different purposes and follow different market dynamics. Mainstream developers don't target them directly.