(Disclaimer: Red Hatter since almost 15 years. I never doubted for a second that we would open source what we buy. Ansible, 3Scale, CoreOS, we have a long history of sticking to our principles)
I hope for all of us that doesn’t happen anytime soon, but IBM acquired Redhat, not the other way around... plenty of sun folks learned that the hard way.
Arguably a lot of OS progress that we are seeing today, especially in the enterprise, is a direct result of IBM’s decades old investments in tools like Eclipse, which was probably the first enterprise grade open source development software, but more importantly, by promoting OS in the enterprise in the late 90s and early 2000s at a time when MS FUD about Linux was at an all time high.
P.S. I also agree with other people posting here. Red Hat is chock full of people who are absolutely looney about Open Source. It's at the heart of everything we do.
AWX isn't a trivial or unimportant product. For deployments of scale it's very important. It would also have been very easy to hoard the code and not release it, so the fact that RH did is impressive to me.
Having not tried to use open source AWX I'll take your word for the state of it. That saddens me greatly, and RH should do better. RH normally works pretty hard to avoid exactly that, but nobody is perfect (not making an excuse, just acknowledging failure).
Have you tried to contribute to AWX and had a bad experience?