It's a little misleading to say "its [RedHat's] perl 5.8.0 build". The fault was with perl5.8.0 in general, which by design assumed STDOUT would expect utf8 if in a utf8 locale. Redhat just was unfortunate in being one of the most prominent platforms to hit the combination of 5.8.0 and the OS defaulting to have a utf8 locale.

This design was reconsidered in 5.8.1. See perl581delta for more information (including about the new -C switch to explicitly state what STDIN, etc. expect.)