At the same time, though, the way we run companies (especially the big ones) is typically terrible. The autocratic management model most large companies employ in pursuit of the illusive feeling of being "in control" flies in the face of everything we know about how to get things done efficiently and effectively.
The most fascinating part about working at Red Hat is the fact that on one side of us we have this "the only barriers to entry are time, interest and ability to find your niche" free-for-all (albeit one that needs to address its serious structural inequality issues), while on the sales and marketing side, we're playing in the same business oriented enterprise market as the rest of the large software vendors.
Nobody else has ever tried something like this on this scale before. Unlike many open source vendors, we deliberately have the project/product split so we can keep the company's interests from directly controlling the open source projects (there's obviously some impact, but "Red Hat needs it" isn't a reason, it's motivation for us to figure out why the change is also in the interests of the project). The community-focused R&D side of things is certainly more chaotic and less polished than the business-focused product side. But the fact remains that our subscribers are helping to fund the creation of large amounts of software that is then made freely available to anyone in the world, whether they're our customer or not.