Red Hat sell enterprise services and solutions. The Linux distro is more of a delivery mechanism than a core product itself. IBM could very easily repackage and

Red Hat sell enterprise services and solutions. The Linux distro is more of a delivery mechanism than a core product itself. IBM could very easily repackage and sell Red Hat's offerings, though IBM can only do so much when it comes to supporting those offerings, as they are not in control of what Red Hat themselves do next. They could also, of course, take a similar approach and create their own, which to some extent they actually do. Red Hat did a smart thing and used their open source offerings to deliver business value outside of the product space. It's an approach that most other successful OSS companies seem to have have followed.