Early CoreOS employee here. CoreOS technology forms the basis of Red Hat's OpenShift 4. It was definitely a product driven acquisition, not any attempt to kill competition.
Success is one of those things that can only be measured with respect to a certain frame of reference. The consumer perspective(s), the investor perspective, and the employee perspective can all lead to wildly different evaluations of a project's success.
On the positive side, you've got the fact that they made it to a profitable exit, which would be hard to ignore if you had a financial stake in the venture. You've got the implication that Red Hat believed that CoreOS was essential to its fortunes in a container-oriented future as a clear vote of confidence that they built something good. The fact that Red Hat kept CoreOS going suggests that they felt it was so good that their existing technology couldn't realistically catch up.
On the negative side, if you don't like Red Hat then, yeah, that certainly counts as selling out.
Regardless of the acquiring company's motivation, being acquired is one of the textbook criteria for a successful startup. The other is becoming a large company by themselves, but this is rare.
And since Red Hat kept Container Linux/CoreOS open source, this wasn't really a move to eliminate competition. They can support enterprise clients, but the open source nature doesn't stop another company from offering their own enterprise support.
> Regardless of the acquiring company's motivation, being acquired is one of the textbook criteria for a successful startup.
Depends on the acquisition price. Acquihires are failures. Investors might get their money back, and everyone else (including founders) walks away with nothing but a job at some company they didn’t necessarily want to work for.
