I certainly don't want to argue or appear confrontational, but wanted to ask you this:

Have there ever been any situations where the acquisition of a smaller company by a larger one has resulted in the smaller company remaining independent? Or has there been any positives for companies like Red Hat when they get bought?

Usually I hear or read the positive-yet-bland press release talking about how wonderful this is, and how big-corp won't destroy little-corp's culture. Yet a year or less afterwards, I read stories of how everyone in little-corp has been laid off, and now little-corps applications/services are now crap.

I'm a huge Fedora/CentOS/RHEL fan, and use it every opportunity I get. I'm very, very worried that Red Hat will be gutted and defiled until there's nothing left. Which is a very, very bad thing for open source because Red Hat is a huge cornerstone of OSS development and support.