Other things which suck as a business - hiring staff, renting an office, paying taxes, advertising, getting legal advice ... The argument is, contributing to o

Other things which suck as a business - hiring staff, renting an office, paying taxes, advertising, getting legal advice ... The argument is, contributing to open source helps solve your problem in a more sustainable way. Maintaining your own fork of Linux isn't feasible, so you contribute patches back to the mainline. But doing this can be ... daunting, so you might be better paying some third party to handle this for you. Thus Red Hat. Now, your competitors get a free ride on your patch, but presumably they didn't have your problem or have sunk money into an alternative solution, so it's not like they get the same benefit you did.