- Eliminate a competitor
- Absorb another company's team
Not all the reasons are as macabre as they sound; sometimes the bought company failed to monetize properly whatever they were doing, and their developers decided it was time to stop eating from bean cans. In those cases an acquisition can improve their diet slightly.
The folks who created CentOS didn't do it as a business. It was created because they wanted it to exist.
Once the acquired company numbers are loaded into the right spreadsheets that reflect reality in business ops, executives will see a bunch of cells in yellow and red color... which is not good.
The tech and talent is still being used, like the cargo ships in your example, it's just the competition that's been killed.
Watch Microsoft carefully.
Their own announcement yesterday.
> It will be available and actively maintained.
CentOS8 will not be after 31 December 2021, that's what they announced yesterday. CentOS7 will be, until 30 June 2024, according to their current status page, but who's going to trust them after what they pulled yesterday? Overnight, they changed CentOS8's End-of-life from 31 May 2029 to 31 Dec 2021. Surely you understand that that made a few people a bit upset.
The only thing actively maintained in the future will be CentOS Stream, which is not CentOS classic as people understoond and used it. CentOS classic were RHEL-release clones without Redhat branding and support. CentOS Stream is RHEL-next Beta.