[PaulHoule]

Apart from the causes, the reality is that very few companies have been successful at monetizing open source, and many of the ones that do only appear to be successful because of "echo chamber" effects.

Red Hat Linux is the main counterexample. Companies do pay for their support, but CentOS nips at their heels and Red Hat has also lost the support of the "enthusiast" community which has largely gone to Ubuntu.

Cloudera is an example of the kind of "hype-driven" company that gets taken seriously because they get written about in TechCrunch every few days, but they don't have any unique selling point, particularly compared to the free Hadoop distribution. When they got started, the idea of offering a GUI client seemed like a good idea, but after the devops revolution this became value subtraction instead of value addition. (Why click hundreds of times through multiple forms to set up a cluster and have to repeat the whole process all over again next time you build a cluster when you can type a few commands, hit ENTER and have it be done?)

[Pyxl101]

Not to diminish your point about CentOS interacting with RedHat's business model, but note that RedHat acquired CentOS in Jan 2014:

https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2014-Janu...