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Interviews: Ask Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst A Question (redhat.com)
Jim Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008, as its valuation rose past $10 billion and the company entered the S&P 500. He believes that leaders should engage people, and then provide context for self-organizing, and in 2015 even published The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance (donating all proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation). The book describes a post-bureaucratic world of community-centric companies led with transparency and collaboration, with chapters on igniting passion, building engagement, and choosing meritocracy over democracy.
Jim's argued that Red Hat exemplifies "digital disruption," and recently predicted a world of open source infrastructure running proprietary business software. Fortune has already called Red Hat "one of the geekiest firms in the business," and their open source cloud computing platform OpenStack now competes directly with Amazon Web Services. Red Hat also sponsors the Fedora Project and works with the One Laptop Per Child initiative.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick out the very best questions, and then forward them on for answers from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
Jim's argued that Red Hat exemplifies "digital disruption," and recently predicted a world of open source infrastructure running proprietary business software. Fortune has already called Red Hat "one of the geekiest firms in the business," and their open source cloud computing platform OpenStack now competes directly with Amazon Web Services. Red Hat also sponsors the Fedora Project and works with the One Laptop Per Child initiative.
So leave your best questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick out the very best questions, and then forward them on for answers from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
Systemd, WTF???
As I understand it, one of the stated goals was to speed up boot times. It's had exactly the opposite effect on my Ubuntu system -- that is, when the boot doesn't die altogether when I try to mount NFS shares. (Also, thanks to systemd, I can't even *reboot* or shut down the machine when there's a hung NFS process. I am forced to hard-reset it.)
For years, warning flags have been raised about systemd. It more or less seems that we're bringing all the disadvantages of the Windows architecture to Linux, without any of the advantages of running WIndows.
So, again: systemd, wtf???
Now that CentOS has received a more official status in the RH world, what are the plans for the project?
is his choice, who decides what is "merit"?
... The Red Hat Society?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
As a professional, I have had dozens of job offers over the past 2-3 of years, EU and US, well paid and all, with a weird common criteria: free stuff. Spacewalk not Satellite, Openstack not RHEV etc. Do you have some hints for how to explain the provenience of all that good stuff and the need for proper training and support?
What is current commitment of Redhat with open source for 2017? Redhat may be the most profitable software company that endorse open source their products. What is the recommendation for other companies to be profitable and at the same time remain being good open source citizens?
Love open source.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/be...
Is Redhat aspiring to be the new Microsoft?
Does this marginalize the role of operating system vendors? I would imagine that most AWS customers would lean on Amazon for technical support rather than Red Hat.
It appears plain that Red Hat has spent plenty of money on virtualization with KVM and friends.
It is plain to me that KVM and friends work fine on every other distribution.
If my goal is a KVM host, why should I buy RHEL instead of just using it on some other distribution?
Kid-proof tablet..
Hi Jim,
Many proprietary hardware vendors continue not to take the Linux desktop and workstation markets seriously. Recall, e.g., Linus's rant against nvidia. As a leader in the Linux and FOSS communities, what will you do to persuade major vendors to write and maintain functional drivers for RHEL and Fedora?
Thank you,
- A.
GNOME is a Red Hat project due to the amount of people and funding they get from Red Hat. Then, why does GNOME have such an unusable UI, particularly to the mayor audience of your products? The UI makes basic tasks such as switching between windows a chore unless you install shell extensions, which break frequently and cause unstability.
like?
Is that too many folks simply don't know Open Source exists. What's it going to take for someone to put a Raspberry Pi, bundled with a heavily app-loaded memory card, in the impulse buy section at Walmart?
Right now, Windows has been a nightmare for business. The tech support costs are awful. https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/10/21/1521204/macs-end-up-costing-3-times-less-than-windows-pcs-because-of-fewer-tech-support-expense-says-ibms-it-guy Many geeks don't like the Win10 spying.
Macs are nice, but the software ecosystem is a little lost. Upgrade and lose this app, or stay behind and miss out on that one. Plus they look like jellyfish or octopi with all those converters hanging off.
Linux seems like what folks need. You can get a damn fine laptop for $500, whereas a mac could set you back a couple thousand. When a company is buying hundreds of thousands of laptops, those numbers add up.
But, ya know, we see good Linux support for cloud systems. Good support for servers. But the desktop, you kinda have to be an expert to get Linux installed let alone keep it working... When will Red Hat or Ubuntu or whomever step up to the plate and make it brain dead simple for business laptop users. Not just the initial install, but keeping it up to date... The parts are there. But, you know, you upgrade this and that breaks... The sales guys really can't handle it. Tech guys, sure, but we'll sink way too much time into keeping the computer going that should be spent on actual work... It just seems like we're missing this last step.
How come the account teams seem to undermine the value of a TAM and only position them as a support resource given that a TAM if given the opportunity can be much more then just an escalation contact within Red Hat like adding value from a proactive perspective?
When is Red Hat going to provide a supported feature matrix for all of the features in Openstack? Something that provides a list of features and whether they are supported, require a support exception or not supported even though they are supported upstream?
What's your favourite type of chocolate?
Red Hat has been involved with Linux for a long time now. We've seen a lot of desktop/workstation-oriented contributions to projects like systemd, GNOME, Wayland, and so forth.
Yet despite all of this effort, why do we see so little uptake of Linux within the desktop/workstation market? One Slashdot submission from July 2016 puts Linux's desktop market share at just over 2%. A similar submission from October 2016 puts it just over 2%, as well.
Why is Linux's share of the desktop market so abysmally low, even with several of the past releases of Windows (Vista, 8, and even 10) being widely disliked, and with Linux distributions typically being free, and after existing for over two decades now?
And should it concern us that the most widely-used Linux-based OS, Android, has actually discarded/replaced so much of the software that Red Hat has rallied behind? It's almost like Linux is most successful when the software that Red Hat is involved with is not used.
Given this lack of success, should the various desktop-oriented initiatives that Red Hat has started or worked on be considered failures?
If they aren't currently considered failures, at what point would they be considered failures? Would Red Hat's support for them be promptly terminated if they were deemed to be failures?
How would you recommend to somebody who feels they have a great application idea and is probably ready to go for Angel/1st round funding but feels that the application should be Open Source?
Do you put in customization/support as the way to fund the endeavor long term or is there another approach for the OSS conscious entrepreneur?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Is it possible to add a feature to the first stages of the installer whereby people can choose to send a notification that on their system the installation failed. otherwise failed installations will probably rarely be reported. maybe it would be good to know just how many installations are failing before setup is complete, and the person has simply moved on to try another distro.
How do you compete against Silicon Valley - Bay Area startups?
We know that
* SV/BA/Cal startups generally leads the rest of the industry by 30--50 years
* They take away all the superintelligent--superindustrial people
* They are awash in capital
* They are hyper-flexible, hyper-disruptive, and can build a monopolistic empire overnight
* They are hyper-hype, hyper-hip, and can drown you in voices
What prevents some tech startup from rendering you irrelevant suddenly? Or just buying you outright? Last time I checked, your market cap is only $13 billion. This is well within the reach of a Western coast tech giant, or some lucky startups.
Or for Redhat to enter the consumer market in any form?
I like blue. Oh ya and purple and orange are cool. And mint green, neon hot pink and turquoise. Also cyan, and FF2323, E386D9, FEBE57, black, FFFFFE, F5FF24, ABACAB, DABABA, 88.7FM WOBO, and gray.
They are based in NC, so as of now, you need to go to the bathroom that's on your birth certificate
I'm curious your thoughts on why Linux hasn't grabbed more laptop/desktop marketshare from Windows and MacOS over the years? It seems that with the privacy concerns around Windows 10 and Apple's lack of focus on MacOS there may be a huge opportunity in the near future. What things need to happen in the consumer marketplace and within the OSS community for it to really take off? Can 2017 be the year of the Linux desktop?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
And that's bad because..?
More and more traditional application functionality is being offered by online services, meaning less and less of it is distributed and users can't change how they work. Companies can build proprietary services and create their own private forks and fixes without contributing back to the general community. Some open source licenses encourage this, others like the GPL discourages this. The Linux kernel and a great many other parts of Red Hat Linux is built on that user freedom and enforced sharing of code.
We see Google has great success with Android under the Apache license, except for the kernel. Apple built OS X based on a BSD kernel. While open source probably has a bright future at the bottom of the stack, will it mainly become the "plumbing" of proprietary systems using non-copyleft licenses? Will copyleft applications adapt to this new hosted, service-oriented world? Be an alternative to it? More or less fade out as users move to the cloud? Obviously this won't have a definitive answer, but I'd like your thoughts on what direction we're headed.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What is your opinion on the GNU GPL and enforcement of the GPL?
What do you think about the timing of releasing RedHat Satellite 6, based on Katello?
Katello is a Foreman + Candlepin + Puppet + Pulp solution for patching large numbers of systems. It also had a 1.0 release that was not installable by a sober person. Also, 1.0 was useless once install due to the task engine being broken. Even not it has a rather mixed reception at places that discovered that locally installed Satellite instances generate failed tasks constantly with a need to flush the database of 'lock' entries and errored out tasks.
Was it too early or not beta tested enough? Or was their some political reason to move so quickly off Spacewalk, the previous platform?
Orchestration is the hot topic right now for automation verses last year's configuration management tools. Ansible is more orchestration than configuration management. Puppet and Chef require tools like mCollective to pickup the orchestration piece. RedHat now runs Tower. And Tower now ships as part of the RedHat Ceph storage product. RedHat's Satellite product is based on the Foreman which includes Salt, Puppet, Chef and Ansible support.
But where is this market heading? Are we likely to see consolidation? Integrations? Or even a flood of config management system tied products from vendors?
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
So, do you think the video "Truth Happens" is as timely now as it was a decade ago? I saw it presented about a decade ago by Michael Tiemann and Mark Webbink in Asheville, NC, and gave Michael a tour of my work facility the next day. I was impressed then, and cotinue to be impressed now.
So who wins in a "code off" ?,
Jim Whitehurst, Mark Shuttleworth, Tim Cook, Larry Page, or Satya Nadella.
It does seem to be that way, more and more.
Hey Jim,
how is it that giving the girl a long hug, waiting for her to look up, creates that special opportunity for a kiss? It seems like it worked on HEJ...
Has your financial rise changed the company in any way, and has it made Linux more respectable?
I've asked this question several times but didn't get answer :)
I am running > 250 of Linux desktops at the company and can get even more, but there is no centralized management solutions for that and that's an issue with customization and security too, KDE desktop is very good at some point with it's ability to have strict configuration files and immutable options, that does about 1/4 of what we can get with MS + GPO and we see that a little effort is required to make things work.
Can we expect that RH will enter that market in the nearest (3-4 Y) future?
Thanks
"It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
We use and love Ansible, but it still seems to be a separate product. Are there plans to integrate it more? Having it as an integrated deployment option for JBOSS Operations network (JON) would be good.
My question is about RHCA exams. It is very good and we are very happy about RedHat new subscriptions based trainigs. It is great. But when it comes about RHCA, it is limited for locations. RHCA level exams are very expensive, and travel and accomodations makes it more expensive. I am 2xRHCE, because of these exams is available in my location. Azerbaijan Baku. MIddle EAST, Caucasus does not have center to take exam. Pease take this into consideration. Vmware, Cisco, Microsoft, AWS, OpenStack makes their exams available in everywhere online, so it is easy for everyone to take it. Why open source company limits people passions to location. I believe that me and people like me can become multi level RHCA if they get chanse to take exam in their own location. And this will help recognition and value of RedHat in regions also. PLease make this available as Cisco for us. At least make it possible on Kiosk In Georgia or Azerbaijan so we can take exams also. I am from Azerbaijan, Baku. With Loves to best open source company in the world.
Worked on SunOS, Solaris, MacOS, Red Hat, CentOS, and, more recently, Ubuntu. CIOs choose Red Hat mainly for support and reliability. Reliability is the word that comes to most engineers mind when the RH and CentOS OSes are mentioned (certainly for good reasons). Reliability mainly relies on using older kernels and features, that have been patched over and over ; sure, that works, reliability wise. But on a number of rather recent projects, comparing Ubuntu server and RH/CentOS, it appears settings services up (eg samba) was way easier on the newer Ubuntues than on the latest RH/Centos (not mentioning the many issues migrating from 6 to 7) . Also, using newer kernels, Ubuntu performs well, taking advantage of the newest internals, memory management and sharing, IPC etc ... and no specific reliability issue (IMHO, reliability wise, Ubuntu and the like are as solid as RH nowadays).
Question: in 2017, does reliability still mean using long-tested, but older kernels and features?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Given some users concerns over mandatory vendor signed firmware and the possibility of it being (intentionally or unintentionally) compromised with no effective way to override or replace it, what efforts is Red Hat taking to ensure the trustworthiness of 'certified' systems, verify the integrity of the system, and ensure sensitive data (such as signing keys, sensitive corporate information, etc) cannot be accessed or exfiltrated at a privilege level higher than the operating system is capable of providing auditing and integrity services to?
If no strategy is in place, rare as it may be, what would be your public response should it come to pass that a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system WAS compromised due to such an exploit, whether via OOB services enabled by firmware, or via access to management interfaces via kernel level device nodes (/dev/mei for example?)
I bring this up because we are now in year 8 or 9 of mainstream hardware with mandatory (often obfuscated) vendor firmware capable of undocumented operation outside of and simultaneous to OS operate. Given the prevalence of containers and 'cloud technology' there is now a very real possibility of chained exploits allowing a third party to steal ssl keys, or other sensitive info, even if such information was transferred to a newly running VM after performing attestation by compromising the system with above-hypervisor level privileges, and at least on ARM and maybe AMD gaining access to the privileged system keychain, which could allow silent compromise keys not easily replaced outside of normal renewal intervals, or in some cases (like for example permanently fused keys as these very systems use for firmware management processors!) not at all.
Wtf? +1 for useless post
Hi Jim,
I like Redhat as a product, and I'm happy to support the cause, but at $149 per year for a basic desktop license, it doesn't compete well with other pay-OS vendors e.g. M$, are there plans to make the desktop cost for personal use more affordable? I use CentOS on the desktop, but would gladly pay for a little quicker updates, and the Redhat branding.
Thanks,
Bob
When will RHEL have up-to-date packages? Outdated packages (docker, git, etc) makes RHEL a pain to use. And we need to add EPEL to have the basic tools, we need. I do not really see why we pay for RHEL, when we can get Fedora, which much better suits our needs, for free. Please note, that outdated and stable are not equal.
I suppose my tl;dr question is: "What future do you think exists for HR Departments in large and small organisations alike, including your own?"
I graduated a few years ago and a lot of my friends who are now working in organisations with HR departments seem to have a relatively similar view of HR, and to anyone reading this comment, it might be similar to your view too. A stereotypical bunch who don't entirely solve your problems; an iron fist inside a velvet glove; fake smiles and empty promises; just another function of management designed to save money, etc.
One person I know works in pretty small private company with no real need for HR, but admits that the office atmosphere can sometimes take a step too far beyond 'banter' as the vast majority of the office are men. That said, I have other friends who now work in HR for companies like LinkedIn and Google, and they feel that they have a great internal relationship with the other employees.
Additionally, what is RedHat's philosophy / approach to HRM and the employee relationship?
Thanks, Jim.
PS: I recently ordered your book 'The Open Organisation' for a family member who works in academia. I am interested to hear their thoughts on it, as well as giving it a read myself.
For the sake of diversifying diversity, have you considered changing your name to Jimima Blackhurst?
Red Hat is big and getting bigger. Where are you heading at the moment? Would Red Hat ever try to move into the the more consumer-focused places where Ubuntu has ventured, or is that just not profitable enough?
Are there any plans or products to help with IoT security?
RedHat is one of the few companies that can step in and do something in regards to device security, even when device makers have little to no interest in this topic, as to them, security has no ROI, or as one IoT company exec told me, "the only person that has ever made money from a padlock is the lock maker."
Being able to lure IoT vendors to use secure tools wouldn't just benefit them, but it would benefit the Internet in a whole. Even something like manifest lists that interact with FirewallD to ensure a device is only able to communicate with authorized devices and cannot take input/output from rogue sources would improve the IoT ecosystem tremendously.
RH Satellite is a good item, but it would be nice to see Katello replaced by something with a lot fewer moving parts. A patch management server should be simple, fast, and sturdy, and in my experience, Katello is none of those things. Are there any plans on the horizon for making something that isn't so delicate, requiring so many libraries and prerequisites to even produce a web page?
Sir - One of the larger challenges facing the US Military is the recruitment / retention of skilled IT professionals into the military ranks, both officer and enlisted. Why do you think that is? - Gabe
Given Ubuntu's success at providing a stable, developed and popular desktop environment for non-technical consumer users, why doesn't RedHat provide the same thing? Why is that right for Ubuntu but not RedHat?
Hey Jim,
When are you going to reveal the big drive to push systemD was to give you corporate control of pid 1 and bypass the pesky kernels GPL code for product and licensing lockin?
I have found that RHEL is too stagnate / static to keep pace with the rate at which the kernel is now developed. The 3.10 kernel is four years old at this point and the fact that RHEL7 will be in production support until 2024 is disheartening because the enterprise industry will be a decade behind the latest kernel developments and updates from associated projects. Compared to other vendors Linux offerings, when I use RHEL I get the same feelings I got when I was force to use AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. I hated administrating those products because they were stuck with defaults like ksh from a decade ago.
My question is, would Red Hat ever consider releasing a Linux distribution with a shorter development cycle and with more aggressive tracking of upstream projects? I see a place for a distribution that is somewhere in between RHEL and Fedora. Perhaps you could morph or fork CentOS into the upstream development for RHEL? For example: Upstream --> Fedora (Bleeding Edge) --> CentOS (Next Release of RHEL) --> RHEL. This would give system engineers and architects a greater range of products to choose from and it could help stabilize RHEL even more then it already is.
In short, the Linux kernel is the largest and the fastest moving software project in the world, so what changes are you going to make to keep up with it?
What is your view on bacon?
Hi Jim,
Thank you for answering our questions! How do you view top-down product driven development vs bottom-up engineering driven development? Are there situations where one excels vs the other?
Thanks,
Mark
WHO CARES how fast it boots... unless you're running on a laptop... and how many folks are running RH or RH-descended distros on laptops?
Hell, one of our couple-hundred servers and workstations, ALL WIRED, ALL ON ALL THE TIME, is an HP 580dl Gen5... and it takes (I've timed it) about 70 seconds before there's any video signal from the POST.
And parallel startup? When something fails, you've just *seriously* complicated debugging.
Give me one good reason for a *binary* error log (journalctl). One. When a systems in a degraded state, I'd like to use cat/grep/vi/more/less/etc/etc. Why should I *have* to use journalctl... oh, that's right, it's a binary error log.
The UNIX way (which includes Linux): of all the ways I can do something, which one would I personally prefer to use.
M$, Apple, and now systemd: no, the way you want to do it is the *wrong* way, our way is the *right* way, and we'll do our best to keep you from doing it the "wrong" way.
Do you have any idea just how much systemd is actively *hated* by the people who earn their living by running Linux? What are you offering *us*? Do you *really* want a lot of bad PR, and fewer recommendations?
Jim,
You've made a point before that RH is an infrastructure software company, so productizing applications (say, LibreOffice) makes little sense for the company. Nevertheless, IT is truly a stack of abstractions, and one man's application is another man's infrastructure, ultimately all the way to the business and its customers. For example, OpenStack is mostly a bunch of user-space applications, but most IT folks view them as infrastructure upon which business objectives can be met. Contrast that with, say, a CRM system, which is widely viewed by IT folks as an application, but ultimately the non-IT business folks view that much like infrastructure: just stuff that needs to be in place to get "real" work done.
Given that, how does RH decide where to draw the line on the infrastructure-application spectrum when considering what open-source projects it will productize and offer to enterprises? Is there a future where ERP systems, big data analytics tooling, blockchains, or other "applications" from our robust open source communities get concerted, product-based investment and certified offerings from RH? Or is RH content to be a technology plumbing company? (Which is a fine business to be in as RH has so amply proved over the years.)
Disclaimer: anonymous RH employee here...
I never said it was. Personally, I'm fine w/ that, although many slashdotters would react like Meryl Streep last night and mod me down
Artificial Intelligence, in particular Deep Learning, is exploding in popularity, with major companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia openly shifting their entire strategy towards it. The technology is solving real problems, today, like cancer detection and image recognition. Many of the most important projects in AI, like TensorFlow and Theano, are open sourced. Yet it seems like Ubuntu is the lead platform for these new workloads. Many of these projects don't run on even Fedora. Is Red Hat planning to get into the AI game and if so how?
Jim, you've made the point before that Red Hat is an infrastructure software company. Productizing something like Libre Office doesn't necessarily make sense with that understanding. Nevertheless, one man's application is another man's infrastructure, and this is especially true the more you frame it in business terms over technical terms. OpenStack is a bunch of applications that we in IT know really to be infrastructure intended to be tailored to meet business objectives. CRM, on the other hand, is viewed by IT folks as an application, but a sales team simply views it as something needed to be more efficient in their "real" job: infrastructure, if you will.
Where does Red Hat decide where to draw the line along the infrastructure/application spectrum when considering which open source projects to productize? And how has that decision line changed over the course of your tenure? Are you expecting future changes in that vein? That is, might we see Red Hat certified offerings in ERP, big data, block chain, or other "applications"?
Hi Jim,
Will the past appointment of Frank Caleroni be the greatest blunder ever made in the history of Red Hat? Frank Caleroni is gone now, but the damage he has done, and that Red Hat's culture still endures, has been enormous. How will Red Hat ever recover from it?
As one wrote at Glassdoor:
'The Frank Caleroni era will go down as the most destructive period in the company's history. Over a mere 18 months, many of the company's brightest leaders were driven out of the organization and replaced by big company groupthinkers who tried to apply a huge company bureaucracy to a thriving, unique mid-sized company in growth phase. In addition, this leadership has actively eliminated US jobs and shipped the work to India. Predictably Red Hat is now facing operational problems that other large companies experienced 10 years ago with this strategy. The once thriving culture has degraded from "I work someplace special" to "this is just another job at a faceless big corporate company." '(December 23, 2016)
Loosing a unique culture of an Open Organization is easy, maintaining and advancing it is quite hard (look at W. L. Gore and Associates, maintaining a culture is a continuous challenge).
I Hope Red Hat will regain its unique open culture of the past and not being a '...faceless big corporate company.'
Good luck with healing Red Hat!
How can we improve the future of OpenStack? The dominance of Amazon has challenged the relevance of well funded players like Microsoft, Google, and IBM. How can OpenStack compete? The network effects around a dominant cloud platform threaten to relegate OpenStack to be a long term niche player, like Linux on the desktop. How can we avoid this fate?
Red Hat has distinguished itself through its commitment to open source and its ability to remain profitable.
Mike Olson famously said "you can't build a successful stand-alone company purely on open source."[1] He argues that you cannot scale an open source model that does not rely on selling proprietary components because it is too easy for competitors to undercut a vendor's services offerings when they don't have to pay for R&D.
How do you feel about that assessment? Is Red Hat's success impossible to replicate by other open source companies?
What advice to you have for building a sustainable business, especially one that is driven by open source values?
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...
As Red Hat has scaled, it has to remain staffed with all types of non-technical business professionals. How do you help these professionals learn to "sell free software"? Has it been difficult to train these professionals on the open source business model?
Hi Jim.
When I started in computing I had this notion that I was part of something that was making the world a better place. That was 40 years ago and probably based more on the science fiction of the time than reality. Somedays it doesn't feel that way anymore. Technology has come a long way and we have lots of shiny wonderful stuff, but we have a lot of downsides too. (Surveillance to name just one.)
Do you think you are making the world a better place?
Thanks for doing this.
(Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat on virtualization and kernel)
The pace of the Linux kernel is too fast for integrating _everything_ that happens in Linux, so we choose selectively what to upgrade in order to have time for integration testing. Stabilizing a new version of the kernel for a RHEL major update can take up to one year, between all the various phases (initial testing, fixing any major regressions before forking, putting finishing touches on features after forking, final integration testing, fixing other bugs after forking).
However, many drivers and subsystems of the RHEL kernel are updated with every minor update. I'd say that RHEL 7.3 for many important parts of the kernel (filesystems, blk-mq, SCSI, KVM, LVM, etc.) is on par with Linux releases between 4.2 and 4.5, depending on the particular piece you're looking at.
You've embraced. You've extended. When are you going to extinguish?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>> He believes that leaders should engage people, and then provide context for self-organizing,
Definately. The elephant in the room here is that benefit analysis has clearly shown the need for a lazer-focussed pushback. Leaders should be imagineering win-win solutions by doubling down on proactively facilitating a circling of the wagons in order to adopt deep-dive ecosystems that promote a sales-driven call to action.