Disclaimer, I work for Red Hat. That being said... The big things for our customers isn't just support, it is stability. When you build your systems on RHEL 8

Disclaimer, I work for Red Hat. That being said... The big things for our customers isn't just support, it is stability. When you build your systems on RHEL 8 (just released), you will get 10+ years of support and patches for that system. Those changes are all guarenteed to be binary compatible, so the risk of patching ever impacting systems is low. If there is a critical security vulnerability (say Heartbleed in openssl), Red Hat will backport the fix to every supported version of RHEL. That means you get the security fix without (1) having to upgrade the entire openssl dependency and risk breaking something else and (2) without pulling in newer changes that might have their own vulnerabilities. Going along with the stability, vendors can QA their products against RHEL as a known target. Last reason for now, if you are in an industry with any kind of compliance requirements, like FIPS, Red Hat jumps through the hoops to get the certification. That makes RHEL the only option in many environments.