Those changes were heartily welcome; no other company that I know of has believed in Linux so strongly and so early on than RedHat. But if they were doing it all for financial reasons, (as any company would, as there was definite money to be made in a Windows alternative for enterprise systems), then either they were blind to the idea that they would empower any future competitors who could fork off their contributions, or deaf to the notion of what FOSS ultimately was and sought to undermine/control it in the long-run.

I'm bitter about RedHat because I wonder now if the second option was the plan all along.