Perhaps the surface area business value proposition to paying customers is the incorrect place to look for innovation? RedHat has done a tremendous amount for t

Perhaps the surface area business value proposition to paying customers is the incorrect place to look for innovation? RedHat has done a tremendous amount for the Linux kernel over decades, and Ansible was basically a RedHat employee project that was made in response to frustrations and spun out and came back into its fold. Also, prior to the advent of yum (RIP Seth Vidal) rpm was all we had. A lot of "innovation" isn't even hardcore low-level engineering as much as standardization and stewardship - none of these things IBM has been known for since the late 80s perhaps. Selinux was also originally an NSA research project that was adopted quickly by RedHat because most of their customers are security-focused (at least on paper). Not going to disagree that a lot of what RedHat has championed recently has been controversial. What kind of innovation isn't controversial though until usually many years afterward? Also, cultures can be relative to each other and are not definable in single dimensions. But nobody besides the most Kool Aid soaked of IBMers could say that IBM is more of an engineering-centric culture than RedHat.