The great value of RedHat was supported software. You could buy one of those $10,000 per seat software packages for some engineering discipline that was guaranteed to work by RedHat and the vendor and if it wasn't they were quite motivated and helpful in fixing your problem quickly.
RedHat also was trusted to monitor and fix security problems quickly, and was in the privileged position of getting notifications about them before they were public so they could be fixed.
The question is how do you get people to fund these two things?