Seems to me they're way better than Oracle and CiQ. They're pretty much the Valve of Linux servers.
Valve requires you to have an account in order to use Steam, if you publish a game you pay a fee and have all sorts of tools, and the option to rent multiplayer servers through Steam Works.
Red Hat requires you to have an account in order to access the RHEL repos (for free) or you can add your own repositories. Offers all sort of tools for you to manage and deploy infrastructure.
Both contribute money and resources to large open source projects, and the benefits are distributed to everyone. Want to stay out of anything related to them? I don't think you even can because you don't really care about it, it is possible though.
>But muh CentOS fiasco
Happened in 2019, let it go, CentOS Stream has been brought and it is way better, CentOS was a free RHEL version that received RHEL fixes AFTER. Now it receives updates and bug fixes BEFORE RHEL does.
>But muh beta testing
You community distro and maintainers get whatever they can though, I don't see them complaining.
>But le evil corporation wants to conquer Linux
Uhhh... Are you living in 1996?
Corporations have steered Linux development and funding for decades. Linux Torvalds has been on the payroll since forever. What do you think the Linux Foundation is for?
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/leadership
Also the 3D stack is corporate.
https://www.khronos.org/
Community open source works alongside corporate or competes against it.