Comment by PhantomGremlin

Ha-ha, it appears as though you don't understand how free software development works in this context. While Red Hat is a competitor to us, we work with them on their upstream projects just as they work with us on our upstream projects.

Thanks for providing such a detailed write up. I hope that knowing a little about how "frenemies" work together is also of interest to others on HN.

Maybe Red Hat and SUSE will coexist happily well into the future. But you're both public companies, and you each owe certain duties to your shareholders.

In the software world the archetypical example of companies collaborating is Microsoft and (... any of dozens of companies go here ...). It seems that never ended well for anyone but Microsoft.

But perhaps the nature of open source / free software fundamentally changes this dynamic of collaborating with the dominant player in an industry.