[peterwwillis]

You can buy an "inferior competitor" and integrate their feature set into your own products, and end up with a much better integrated solution for your customers, which will strengthen your business.

But switch "inferior" to "superior" and your question makes sense. Red Hat's products mostly suck balls. I can't think of a single one which has been an enjoyable experience to use. People paid for them because they were the IBM of the Linux world.... And now they're the Linux of the IBM world.

[bluesman84]

Or people just trust Red Hat for being always "heart, mind and soul" of the community of contributors that makes open source great. And keep doing the same thing, that inspired many others such as SUSE, Rancher, etc.. and IBM :)

[mugsie]

Red Hat is great - they have done some great things, however -

Heart, Mind and Soul of the Open Source community is possibly a bit of hyperbole.

and - SUSE is (slightly) older than RedHat, so I am not sure you can say RedHat inspired them :)

IBM was inspired by RedHat's earnings (pre acquisition, open source in IBM was .... interesting ... ) and their ability to have a relevant product in the cloud space.