Not directly, but having a lot of IP in the game makes a company much more interesting for investment and acquisition. It's viewed as an asset even though it's

Not directly, but having a lot of IP in the game makes a company much more interesting for investment and acquisition. It's viewed as an asset even though it's open source. RedHat has successfully mainstreamed some of their IP like systemd which is now practically everywhere, where Canonical has tried the same with UpStart in this case and failed. This makes RedHat somewhat of an 'authority' on Linux. And indirectly, they have been making it harder to get official versions without paying, like what they did with CentOS.