Imagine your company spent more than $100 million developing a product. Now imagine that a competitor came along and cloned your product and distributed a near-perfect replica of it. Not good, right? If you’re Apple, you spend years and tens of millions of dollars fighting it, determined to be the one and only source of your product.

If you’re Red Hat, however, you embrace it—as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told ReadWrite in an interview.

After Unix

For years the enterprise data center was defined by expensive hardware running varieties of the Unix operating system. Over time, both Windows and Linux chewed into Unix’s market share, with Red Hat winning the bulk of the Linux spoils. The key to victory? Both Windows and Linux offered low-cost, high-value alternatives to Unix’s sky-high pricing.