[lamontcg]

The better example is that small companies could build on CentOS and when those small companies become big or get bought by someone big and get infested with useless middle management, RedHat could then sell support contracts into those businesses. CentOS was basically a big loss-leader to get lock-in and just wait until middle management went looking to throw money at vendor support to have someone else to blame.

IBM is now going to be cutting that channel off. They might juice a few more contracts in the short term, but mostly they're going to push small businesses away from the RHEL ecosystem entirely and cut off their pipeline of new leads.