>"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor"

There was 6 years in between those two events, and by all accounts CentOS got much better post-acquisition.

There is no "just" here. Originally it was considered a good idea, and (years) later they changed their minds.

"Not acquire competitor, and have to shut down your own firm" is a more crass decision.

Perhaps if you need to acquire and shutdown your competitors, you should shut down your own firm, or at least pursue a different strategy. Monopolistic business strategies are crass.

Leave out the "cr" and I agree

RH did great financially for many years while CentOS was around; do you have some reason to claim that it was an existential threat?

because having CentOS lead to Oracle Linux being a thing which allowed big competitor to offer what was essentially 100% compatible product to your own while undercutting your support costs.

I don't think RHEL/IBM cares about the small losses on CentOS/Rocky/Alma/etc what they found was hurting them was companies like Oracle

I don't think that's correct; AFAIK OEL has always pulled directly from RHEL sources. That is, they were a sibling, not a downstream of CentOS. I am open to the idea that CentOS was basically collateral damage as Red Hat attempted to block Oracle, but that's not the same thing.

That's what I'm suggesting - the only way RHEL could block OEL is to also kill off CentOS as we knew it.

Agree and wish there was something that could be done against such business practices, but it is indeed difficult to regulate.

Over the years I became aware that the acquire-extinguish pattern was definitely not just a coincidence, specifically i remember disney bought up some 'IP' just to litigate against some adjacently-related online fan game in the UK in order to shut it down and 'acquire' its captives, over to a similar product they already owned. Sorry I looked for the exact reference but cant find. There are countless other stories if you look though.

This all came full circle when I was 'enlightening' a young relative who had just finished business school, or rather she 'learned' me. Turns out this acquire/extinguish game is like a whole 100-level course in <pick-your-business-school-of-america>. Who knew.