Comment by sytse

RedHat does a great job of being a trusted advisor for companies. Their people are often embedded at customers and are the first stop to ask for advise on anything related to Linux.

Recently RedHat was transitioning from selling the VM based RHEL to the cloud native OpenShift. They used the relationship they had with customers already using RHEL to 'up-sell' them to OpenShift.

IBM already had a SaaS offering for Kubernetes in https://www.ibm.com/cloud/container-service and RedHat adds a strong self-managed offering for Kubernetes in the form of OpenShift.

IBMs revenue comes from consulting but a lot of their profit comes from software https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-split-between-IT-and-consu... They are also a trusted advisor and are great at closing large and complex purchases. This move will allow IBM to sell more software products and therefore increase their margins.

I have a lot of respect for RedHats policy to open source all the software they sell. I expect that policy to continue.