I have personally seen checks cut to CoreOS that were larger than the D&B number you quote. The set of similar corporate customers we'd run into was surprisingly vast and diverse. Redhat's made a brilliant move here.

I doubt CoreOS has any meaningful revenue (my guess is they are between $5M and $10M of recurring annual revenue). I also doubt they have a single customer that isn't either A. already a Red Hat customer, or B. too small to be interesting to them.

For $250M Red Hat bought outstanding technology, a strong R&D team with community street cred, and upstream influence in Kubernetes. They know how to monetize these things. They definitely did not buy revenue or customers. In fact they got a great price precisely because CoreOS failed to monetize these things sustainably, and needed a way out. It's a great outcome for the team, and a great match for Red Hat.

As someone who used CoreOS in a commercial setting, I think you are spot on. We wanted to pay them but we were never big enough to afford their commercial offerings. They wanted a lot of cash for their subscriptions and I think most would-be customers were looking for something less expensive--basically open source with support.

Redhat offers an existing and proven enterprise customer base that will cut the big checks. Redhat customers are the customers that CoreOS always wanted but likely struggled to acquire.

So are you predicting a CentOS/Red Hat split for existing CoreOS users, or do you think existing customers will migrate to something different?

Probably a mix. A lot of it depends on how they handle the sunsetting and migration.

Assuming the industry norm, which is a botched sunsetting and incomplete migration, the majority of free CoreOS users would go looking elsewhere. And they would probably scatter to the wind rather than flock to a single winner, since the OS space is quite crowded and fragmented.

The D&B numbers would be from the last fully reported year, i.e. 2016. They typically have pretty accurate data.

My point was not to imply this is a bad deal for any of the involved parties, but simply to add a data point to the discussion, one which other entrepreneurs looking for areas to add value should find highly interesting.