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I don't understand this line of thinking. IBM has plenty of people contributing to open-source projects. I wouldn't be surprised if they contributed to etcd even before the acquisition. When it comes to their open-source track record, IBM and Oracle are nothing alike.

Red Hat does not own anything that's valuable aside from their developers, who chose to work at Red Hat due to their pro-FOSS positioning. If IBM chose to start shutting projects like Fedora down or move in the direction of closed-source, these developers would have no desire to remain, and would leave, making that $40B acquisition worthless.

Red Hat has extensive customer relationships, customer databases, contracts for future revenue, partnerships, operational processes, . . . product IP is just a slice of the pie.

It was proposed in July (https://github.com/cncf/toc/issues/136) and voted on in September (https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/143), all before the IBM/Red Hat deal was announced or known to the staff.

The announcement was held for publicity at KubeCon.