How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business(ars technica)

Yeah. I think the biggest weakness of this story is that it goes from a idea in someone's mind to the current success and that makes it very rosy. However the really interesting story is that Red Hat had to struggle hard to figure out how to involve the community as a distribution and how that has been a different learning experience compared to Red Hat's involvement in various upstream projects. I am sure other vendors have learned from that and made it part of their success as well.