> but in terms of working in open source Linux a company like Canonical seems more appealing from my limited knowledge, just because their main product is distributed under a free license unlike RHEL.
RHEL isn't distributed under free software licence?
> In terms of working on interesting new software/infrastructure platforms, working somewhere like Hashicorp, or even working at Google Cloud or AWS also seem more appealing.
I work on Openshift and Kubernetes and for me and barring Google I can't think of a company where I will get to solve as many interesting problems as I have solved at Red Hat. AWS is very new to Kubernetes and I do not think they have lot of people who can mentor someone just starting with Kubernetes. From what I have seen, if you work for a particular cloudprovider, you pretty much become goto guy for that cloudprovider in Kubernetes. It can be blessing or curse but at Red hat - engineers are forced to think one layer above. How will this work on Ceph FS, NFS, iSCSI and EBS? And yeah - You don't feel like second class citizen if you are remote at Red Hat. At some companies even though - they allow remote, they can exclude you, if they want all hands on the deck (like physically).
It is true to some extent that - Red Hat strength isn't churning out new technologies (but they can surprise you). But to Kubernetes for example - it has brought a stability for enterprise(again I could be biased). If you scratch the surface, many features in Kubernetes that you take for granted was developed in Openshift.
