Why

By that metric there are *zero* "majority" contributors to the Linux kernel.

Meanwhile, for every kernel version since approximately forever, LWN has broken down the top companies contributing to the Linux kernel. Red Hat has been at or near the top of that list for a *long* time, and RHEL subscriptions have funded all of that.

> The issue is ongoing as new processors & hardware is being released constantly & will become an even more significant problem with the increasing deployment of newer APUs & other application acceleration hardware rolled into upcoming CPUs, motherboards & IO cards.

Huh? All of this work is being done in the upstream kernels, not within the likes of RHEL. If you truly want bleeding-edge stuff you're going to have to use bleeding-edge software and distributions, not "stable enterprise" stuff that's obsolete before it ever ships.

> Red Hat has a long history of not sending all the Red Hat Enterprise Kernel patches it applies the stock Linux kernel to Linus to incorporate into the stock kernel code.

First, that article is a decade old. Second, that article doesn't say what you claim -- It talks about RHEL kernel sources combining all patches into a single file, not that that there are parts of it "not sent to Linus", or establish any sort of "history" of bad behavior. Red Hat has *always* shipped the complete corresponding source code for all GPL components to their customers and everyone else who receives binaries from them.

(Incidentally, *every* major distribution out there has out-of-tree patches in it. Linus and his lieutenants are infamously picky in what they accept, and sometimes you need to ship fixes or features before they are in a state mainline will accept. Red Hat also has a strict upstream-first policy, which means all new features are developed upstream first, and they won't ship (ie backport and support) any feature that hasn't first landed upstream.

> Red Hat itself has forked upstream projects like MySQL & CUPS for inclusion in its distribution when the upstream developer has changed the project licence to impose further restrictions.

Um, the original MySQL developer forked MySQL, not Red Hat, and pretty much everyone switched over to the new fork. CUPS was forked by OpenPrinting/Linux Foundation, not becaue of licensing issues, but because upstream (ie Apple) has long stopped caring about supporting anything other than current MacOS platforms and stripped out a lot of code that the Linux printing stack still needed. (Also, CUPS didn't "impose further restrictions" with their license change; they switched from GPLv2-only to Apache licensing, which strictly speaking is *incompatible* with GPLv2-only stuff. GPLv3 is compatible with ASL2, so that (and GPLv2+ stuff) wasn't affected)