You could say that Canonical and IBM RedHat compete on offering Linux support, but the reality is that it's not that much harder to switch from RHEL to Ubuntu than switching to any other OS, so I don't think this counts.
IBM RedHat is the steward of RHEL, and Canonical is of Ubuntu, so if you want support from them there are no real other options, but they do work with multiple different ISVs.
If you want to stay 'independent' and have the most leverage you can take a linux which is not from a bigco, such as Debian.
I'm really worried about cloud-lock-in for bigger companies. My previous company switched large amounts of product to AWS, when I asked about how this was feasible after doing back-of-the-envelope calculations they said: well you should not consider list price, nobody is paying list price, we get discounts.
This reminded me of an ISP I worked for in 2006 that invested in large amounts of Solaris machines because they got big discounts instead of going for the much more obvious Linux route. Then after two years or so the new (Oracle at that time?? I'm not sure) sales rep paid a visit and they said, when they were not able to sell MORE new servers: OK screw the discounts, from now you're paying list price. So that got them stuck in a real bad place. I'm afraid the same might happen to companies who move to cloud providers as well.
And then I've not even touched on issues such as privacy, security, business continuity, and losing the skill to actually run your own hardware
i see a trend in recent years in losing the skill for making proper software too - Something that works and is usable and is not about changing colors and pixels and protocols everyday for the sake of it. Maybe the opposite trend of the everybody-can-program since 1995? Or maybe not - not sure how ML-generated stuff will impact all this.
btw there was ~2021 talk/article by same guy about how outsourcing-everything leads to total deskilling:
[1]:https://www.suse.com/c/embrace-linux-diversity-simplified-mu...