I think of it maybe a little differently. CentOS was acquired as a marketing tool to sell support contracts. RedHat was acquired by IBM because selling suppor

I think of it maybe a little differently. CentOS was acquired as a marketing tool to sell support contracts. RedHat was acquired by IBM because selling support contracts no longer works as an open source software business model. It was a rescue operation (on both sides), really. In a twisted way, it's a success story for OSS. The software is so good and its main users so competent that the support contract has moved from being the value to the value-add. (aside) Unfortunately, this is the same thing driving the adoption of all of these new split licenses, which I don't think is a positive direction. (aside): This is actually the second demonstration of this. The first was when Rackspace got rid of its world-class support organization in a race to compete on costs.