What if they bought Red Hat and SUSE. SUSE was acquired by Novell. It getting acquired again is conceivable. Red Hat is an unknown. Last one is Canonical. I thi

What if they bought Red Hat and SUSE. SUSE was acquired by Novell. It getting acquired again is conceivable. Red Hat is an unknown. Last one is Canonical. I think it could happen on the distro side where they get acquired, new stuff goes more proprietary, and so on. As I run it through my head, the main way Linux would stay free are through the remaining contributors to kernel: IBM and Oracle. Mainly IBM since they contribute a ton of code, use Linux extensively, and previously put $1 billion on line to fight Microsoft and SCO. They fought them back before. Oracle's big on Linux these days. They'd probably hit them, too. So, what protects the ecosystem of usable, free Linux is the self-interest of massive, proprietary vendors along with contributions from a few distro's. I probably wouldn't have called that happening 20 years ago.