[phkahler]

Theoretically someone could hire a bunch for Red Hat people and continue the business without too much interruption. The software is open source after all. Granted, the infrastructure would not come along and they couldn't use the trademark. But if I'm a customer and my rep tells me "yeah we had a mass exodus over to XYZ corp and are now supporting largely the same Linux stack under a different name" I may well take my business over there.

[mnw21cam]

Yes, but whoever did the hiring would have to come up with some substantial capital in order to set up all the required infrastructure, and there would be a long lead-time before profits started coming in.