You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used.
What more should they do?
Also note, Red Hat pays engineers for the extended support, the compliance https://access.redhat.com/articles/2918071, etc that customers expect from RH. Engineers contribute both upstream (first) and backport those changes to older releases.
>You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used.
They're paid to work on FOSS projects. Gnome isn't a RedHat project. Nor is the kernel. And they're IBM projects even less.
And most of those projects started without RedHat and RedHat stepped on them to become what it is first. Plus, there are thousands of essential projects they don't have anything to do with, still in the distro.
There was time today's big distros were small and they mostly took from community, packaged it and sold support for it. Rocky is small now so needs to take more from community. If it becomes big later it can also contribute back.
That's one of the benefits of open source. It helps small guys to get started and make it big. Once they become big, they can contribute back.
But that's the thing, Rocky simply can't grow in that way, because they're not trying to do their own thing, they just aim for bug-for-bug compatibility. They are not pushing out new code and helping advance the ecosystem.
The majority of value comes from noncommercial activity with commercial interest. More songs sell after people hear it for free on the radio. More people buy a package only after the free samples.
More license seats sell, but only after 100x more seats were free.
Contribution to FOSS is not just the (SS) code, but the act of making/keeping it genuinely Free and Open.
I don't care about McDonalds or Burger King when someone's going around with free hamburgers handouts - but if I'd been eating free Burger King burgers all along, it's a pretty clear choice where I'll go to buy my business burgers on the VC's dime.
"Mere users" know very well, with less confirmation bias or sunk-cost rationale, what makes a good product. I trusted Red Hat more when they supported CentOS - these recent actions are clearly user-hostile and eschew the main value of FOSS being its network effects.
First, you are making a completely unrelated argument. "Rocky helps sell RHEL": assuming it to be true, that is not a contribution to the open source world. It does not bring new software into the world. It is only a marketing help to IBM's balance sheet, and it helps only insofar as the open source world benefits from IBM making money from RHEL.
Second, the sole direct beneficiary of this hypothesis, IBM, apparently thinks it isn't true, and from what little comments they have released appears to have come to this conclusion after quite a bit of analysis.
Third, from my position of ignorance, I think IBM is probably correct. Why? Because the free burger in your analogy isn't Alma/Rocky, it's Fedora. A user who runs Fedora on workstations or small production servers is very likely to consider RHEL when choosing an enterprise distribution for large deployments, because they are already familiar with the ecosystem but they want stronger stability guarantees than Fedora Server. But a user who is running Alma/Rocky has much less reason to move to RHEL: they gain nothing but the license hassle.
Those Rocky Linux repos are either not code (website, wiki, etc.), and a few are tools for repackaging/rebranding an existing Linux distro's source code bug-for-bug - an activity which, by definition, does not and cannot offer anything more than the original code already did.
If I'm reading that reddit comment correctly it referred to contributions to RHEL not contributions to open source, which if I'm reading it correctly was what your original comment stated.
It seems that Rocky Linux have contributed code as open source, just not directly to RHEL.
Carl George, a principal SWE at Red Hat, claimed to have found exactly one code contribution from the Rocky Linux or Alma projects back to RHEL - a two-line bugfix in a .spec post script.
(Which is only what I, an ignoramus, would expect - if the project aims for "bug-for-bug compatibility", then it doesn't really gain much value from fixing bugs, while a fork would.)
If you think his evaluation of Alma/Rocky contributions is incorrect or incomplete, I'd be interested in hearing your POV as a Rocky engineer.
Then it may be worth asking yourselves "how do we get this fact publicised more widely?" since I don't recall reading about Rocky's contributions either.
(I'm not a heavy user of RHish distros, mind, I only ever anticipate using Rocky if somebody else already decided to deploy a particular project on it so you probably shouldn't put significant energy into whether -I- notice, but there seems to be a perception issue here that's sufficiently widespread that you might get a decent ROI in terms of community growth from doing something about it and I'm pretty much always in favour of community growth whether I anticipate being one of the happy users of the project or not)
So just like RedHat and IBM?