Nothing particularly special has happened: Red Hat has bought another company, this time Sistina. Sistina is interesting because they have been driving the commercial development of GFS - a cluster filesystem for Linux. OpenGFS has existed for a while, but GFS has more features and above all can work with more base technologies (e.g. via network block devices or iSCSI).
Now another company, Proserve, is writing that their product MatrixServer would be much better, that Sistina would need two more years to bring their product up to their level, and of course that their product would be better suited for critical services. Oddly enough, their product is naturally commercial software.
Where's the logical flaw? Quite simple: OpenGFS already exists and is maintained by more people than just those from Sistina. The features of GFS that were previously reserved for the commercial version will find their way into the free version, provided they are useful. OpenGFS will continue to develop, not necessarily GFS - Proserve has picked the wrong opponent. Proserve will have to think carefully about what to do - mere noise won't be enough on its own. It may well be that their product is better - but the question is whether it still will be in a year, or in two years. Open source develops on the basis of needs, not on the basis of marketing features - and development can happen damn fast.
Of course, there can be a disaster like with Mozilla or OpenOffice, where almost only the original developers from the companies work on the projects, and free development only proceeds very hesitantly (Mozilla is slowly getting better, but who knows OpenOffice hackers?). But given the need for cluster filesystems without a single point of failure, I don't think that's the case here.