Enterprise distributions and free software

"There would also be less need to treat related information as proprietary; companies would compete on their ability to support current mainline software, rather than a vendor-specific kernel."

Competition doesn't really work like this; you can't organise with other businesses exactly how you're going to compete (well, unless you're a cartel...), you just *compete*. Red Hat could decide that they're going to do this "follow mainline closely", but it really wouldn't take many failed updates to a supposedly "stable" release for customers to leave for the exits (read: Oracle, Novell) extremely quickly.