Because of its slow growth – a factor of the freebie open source business model – Red Hat has become fodder for Wall Street acquisition speculation, BusinessWeek says, and offers VMware as a possible suitor.

Such an acquisition would give VMware the operating system it’s lacking, make its products cheaper and make it a more viable competitor against Microsoft – or so the theory goes.

BusinessWeek claims to have heard from “some industry executives” that VMware is looking for an operating system and says ousted VMware CEO Diane Greene “had set up meetings with Red Hat in part to position VMware as friendly to open source and possibly as a prelude to a buyout discussion.”

Red Hat also needs the virtualization halo for growth.

Otherwise, the magazine says, Red Hat is trying to maximize revenues by refusing to discount, chasing sales in Asia, pulling resources out of consumer desktop Linux, closing down an online store that sold other people’s open source software and generally focusing on business that pays.