Yea, I imagined it could be a one-off but didn't bother to dig into the situation further. The point is simply that we don't fully know the motivation to sell.

Yea, I imagined it could be a one-off but didn't bother to dig into the situation further. The point is simply that we don't fully know the motivation to sell. Or for that matter, the motivation to buy. For all we know, that competitor is continuing to squeeze RHT's margins. Or maybe Oracle (purveyors of Oracle Unbreakable Linux) approached the board with an offer to buy and someone walked it over to IBM with a note saying 'care to beat this offer from Oracle?' None of this is evidence suggesting there will be another standalone open source vendor. The model seems to be converging towards taking open source technologies, buying a bunch of servers and sysadmins, and renting them out to customers on an ad-hoc basis. In which case, I won't call it winner-take-all but there's obvious economies of scale to be had. If we look at the recent Redis and MongoDB relicensing debacles, it seems like a direct acknowledgement that the cloud service model is eating their lunch.