Here's an extraordinary - and extraordinarily depressing - story from Stefano Maffulli about the Comune di Milano (roughly the Milan city council) pushing to its citizens some free services from Microsoft for, er, free...
When will governments finally learn their lessons about 'free' (gratis) Microsoft offers? They merely acts as agents of monopolisation. ⬆
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
At this point it would be rather foolish to assume that IBM will let Red Hat just "do its own thing" or maintain its corporate culture, identity, projects etc.