That makes more sense. This sounded like a certification exam. The process you describe sounds normal and fairly reasonable, although I must say if I were the

That makes more sense. This sounded like a certification exam. The process you describe sounds normal and fairly reasonable, although I must say if I were the maintainer/developer of some Linux lib/app and applied at Red Hat, I would expect to skip most of that to be honest. But even Google wanted to make Ken Thompson go through their process, which he didn't and thus couldn't work on their main code base. Maybe he did by now or they granted him a license to commit, but it was hard to believe at the time.