But this is all backwards.
> Why should IBM maintain rolling updates into Fedora
The better question is why is IBM maintaining rolling updates into Fedora? Because they have a business incentive to do so. As other comments have opined, they get free testing, free feedback of upcoming changes. The community gets a lot in return. RedHat funds so much open source/free(dom) software development it's ludicrous. There's reciprocity here. There's a lot of other distributions also benefiting from RedHat's work, like Debian (and vice versa).
It seems like the community here on HN has gone complete bonkers over this RedHat business decision. We've reached a next level of open source entitlement syndrome.
We are not entitled to use RHEL for free. We are not entitled to repackage RHEL and sell it for free either. We are only entitled to those part of the source code which is covered by copyleft licenses. Are we entitled to the SRPM for those programs? We don't know. The patches applied, sure. How about the spec files to assemble the RPMs? Who knows. But it seems like everybody are demanding that RedHat should keep doing this work and ensure that third parties can keep their business model of reselling said work.
This is probably not a popular opinion, but the community seem to have a deranged take on this situation.