The problem is that "consulting bonanza" with open source software is really hard to do. It is really, really hard to draw a line between what is custom engineering and what is a non-upstream patch you will have to maintain forever. And that's why Red Hat's mantra is to do everything upstream first, even at the cost of sometimes delivering features later.

Everybody got that completely wrong. Open source works, but you still have to understand how to engineer it. So far, companies that succeeded are mostly following an "open core" model where they control the core too (Atlassian, Automatic). Red Hat is the exception, and with Red Hat putting a lot of effort on upstream OpenStack development no one could pull off open core for OpenStack. Mirantis has plenty of non-upstream code and last I heard wants to sell SaaS to work around that.

Plus, no one devoted the right amount of engineering to the lower levels of the stack (at least QEMU and libvirt). You cannot seriously expect to partner with vendors for guest operating systems without knowing all of the stack---this was something else that Mirantis and others missed.

So the problem was not that OpenStack was bad, it was that everybody thought open source is magic. But it isn't magic, and if it looks like magic, it means you don't understand it.