One thing I hope IBM understands here is that healthy F/OSS projects aren't really the kind of thing you can buy and proprietarize even by "forking"/re-licensing your own code. Ages ago, Oracle learned this when they bought Sun, particularly with the birth of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. More recently, Hashicorp is facing the same phenomenon with the departure of the chief maintainer of Terraform to work on OpenTofu at Spacelift.

Many F/OSS maintainers care pretty deeply about things like software freedom, taking good care of our digital commons, and leaving their mark on the world in a public way. I imagine that's especially true at Red Hat. You can buy the company, you can change the relationship to the community of "outside" contributors, and you can even release new versions of the software under a proprietary license. You can create upheaval for a lot of people, including the users. But you will often not only fail to walk away with key maintainers on your team, but watch them go on to form your competition on a new fork.

I don't personally know anyone who works at Red Hat, but even from the interactions I've seen recently in issue trackers and PRs to projects maintained in part by Red Hat engineers, I'm inclined to have a bit of faith. The upstream-first culture there still seems pretty strong and pretty quality-oriented to me. I don't think you can reliably keep engineers like that and turn them into drones who don't care about the craft and their impact on users and developers.