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Comment by beedogs | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, RedHat tends to be the trendsetter in the Linux world. Once it's gone from RHEL, it'll be gone from most other RPM based distros soon enough. It's kind of a shame that one company has grown to dominate the Linux software ecosystem, often to the detriment of all involved.

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On the contrary, RHEL ships a relatively small subset of packages, and is especially stingy on kernel features in order to make the distribution supportable.

Btrfs is definitely not gone from Fedora, for example.

(Disclaimer: I'm on the virtualization team at Red Hat).

Red Hat has a lot of core Linux contributors on their payroll. Their status is, AFAIK, not undeserved.

RPM-based distros make up maybe 10 % of the Linux installations these days, so we should not overstate RedHat's influence.

RHEL makes up maybe 99.9% of the Linux enterprise installations these days, so we can't overstate RedHat's influence.

I don't think that number is even close to accurate. SLE almost certainly makes up more than 15% of the market alone. And that's ignoring all of the other enterprise distributions.

I believe that 2015 estimates from the IDC[1] had RHEL at ~60%, SLE at ~20%, Oracle Linux at ~12% and "Other" at ~8%. But I can't access the document at the moment.

[1]: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US41360517

Number of installations is not also necessarily a good metric. Red Hat is a very large company with a lot of money and and a lot of employees working on upstream Linux projects and driving their direction.

There are not that many companies doing the same. Which is why they have a lot of influence over the direction of things.

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