[that_guy_iain]

>After all, why would anyone still use RedHat if their competetive advantage (i.e. open source) is lost?

Who do you think finds that a competitive advantage? What company is saying "You know what, we can use Red Hat spend millions and worst case we just hire some devs to continue the work?" I doubt any are.

Their competitive is what support so many packages and companies can not worry about issues. Open source has no part in that.

[Tepix]

In my experience there are edge cases every now and then where a company needs a custom solution and achieves it by patching open source software.

The RedHat support will fix issues, they will not add new features only you need.

[that_guy_iain]

Realistically, if you need custom features to your linux distro, you wouldn't be paying for Red Hat, the moment you modify something your system becomes unsupportable and not in compliance and a whole bunch of other things that are the reason you pay for RHEL.

If you're at the level of needing custom operating system modifications you're probably better suited to finding a distro you can fork. Not pay for RHEL.