Good for RH! AFAIR they abandoned the freely-downloadable Red Hat Linux, and started charging for the pre-compiled versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and this is when they started making money to be where they are today. Didn't they have a falling out with Linus?
That was really just rebranding. Red hat Linux split into Fedora (free) and RHEL (for pay). Even so, the source for all the rpms for both distressing are available, and CentOS has been using that to build their RHEL clone for years, and has always had an amicable relationship with RedHat as far as I know.
He had one of his tedious, high-profile, foul-mouthed rants at a RH kernel dev when Linus didn't understand the dev's patches. Is that what you're thinking of?
They did give Linus a boatload of shares around the time they were going public.
