Red Hat products VS open source community projects

Summary:
This article explains the business model of Red Hat.

Main post:
Red Hat is making money by selling subscriptions (i.e. support for it's products for a given time). All of Red Hat's products are open source and therefore the community behind each project/product is driving the innovation of the final product labeled with a red hat.

Red Hat covers the most important IT infrastructure areas:
Middleware:   JBoss.org    (community project) --> JBoss by Red Hat (product)
OS - Linux:     Fedora  (community project) --> RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)
Virtualization:   Linux KVM --> RVEL (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization)
Provisioning:  Spacewalk   (community project) --> RHN (Red Hat Network)
IDM - LDAP:   389 Directory Server --> RHDS (Red Hat Directory Server)

To make sure that the community is keeping up the innovation Red Hat invests money by hiring main developers within the communities.

Why should I take a Red Hat product, when the community project is for free?
- Getting a product from a community project you get the latest features and versions with community-based support (i.e. forums)
- Getting a product from Red Hat you get a stable & enterprise-ready version with subscription-based support ( i.e. 24/7 phone and online support, depending on the subscription you bought)

More on the subject you find in the Red Hat Whitepaper:
"Why subscribe to enterprise open source software? Top ten reasons to use JBoss Enterprise Middleware" www.jboss.com/pdf/jb-value-of-sub.pdf