Red Hat

The premise was that companies don't pay for the code but for guarantees: certified hardware, security updates for ten years, and someone to call. Red Hat Enterprise Linux became the default where a support chain is required. Fedora serves as the free upstream project where new things are tested before reaching RHEL.

IBM bought the company in 2019 for $34 billion — the largest deal in the history of open source. In 2023 access to RHEL's source was restricted for non-customers, which hit clones such as Rocky and Alma and became one of the more heated licensing arguments of recent years.