Case in point, Red Hat built a $32B business off of mostly selling support contracts for FOSS. Notionally some amount of that was licensing deals, but the core reason to buy RHEL instead of using Debian or something was because RHEL comes with support.

You aren't wrong, but I do think it's worth pointing out that Red Hat writes a metric ton of FOSS code also which it contributes upstream (or the upstream is entirely RH owned/controlled).

For example, Red Hat is the number two contributor to Kubernetes (behind Google). Red Hat extends K8s with OpenShift which makes K8s a PaaS, and that is also open source and freely available as OKD[1]. RH doesn't get paid directly for that work but funds it with support contracts (which in turn enable landing more support contracts).

I know that doesn't contradict what you said, I just don't want to leave a reader with the impression that RH just tacks on a support contract and makes some money. RH does a huge amount of dev on it too.

[1]: https://www.okd.io/

So then what difference does it make? I am not going to fix the code myself anyways and visibility of the source code is irrelavant.

It is like buying a hammer to nail some nails, I don't care the metallurgy of the hammer as far as it gets the job done. If it fails, I buy a better one.

It's about the relative freedom of the market.

A hammer has well known metallurgical properties, so anyone can make one. You don't care whom you buy from, but you buy a cheaper, hopefully better made hammer because nobody tries to fleece you for a 100$ hammer.

In the world with only commercial knowledge of hammers, they cost 10G, people spend many years and invest much capital into going to hammer school, and maybe even you just rent a hammer at a 13G a year rate with support. Nevermind the cost for say, a screwdriver.