Red Hat Posts Its Best Quarter Yet

wrinkledshirt writes "Anybody remember the days when the naysayers said you couldn't build a viable business model centered around open-source software? After Red Hat's 2nd quarter report, well, insert(&mouth, FOOT); is all I have to say. Okay, okay, the hubris of a Linux zealot aside, the numbers look pretty good. Revenue for the quarter was $28 million, with net income at $3 million. You'd think SCO's blathering would have damaged them, but they're actually up the last couple of quarters after posting some net losses in previous quarters." Kudos to Red Hat. They must be doing something right.

Comments

hey...

[Spytap]

I just bought a package...that means i helped!

Re:hey...

[fransplugge]

In the dumb dutch mega stores a redhat package sells for 200 euro. This is cheaper than XP but hardly in tune with the Linux spirit (10 euro for cd's and packaging would be more appropriate). What is to stop microsoft from flooding the (alternative) market with it's own Linux clone?

Re:hey...

[Bilbo]

> What is to stop microsoft from flooding the (alternative) market with it's own Linux clone?

Microsoft is.

Seriously, there's nothing stopping MS from coming out with its own distribution, other than the fact that they would be undercutting their own market more than they would be undercutting RedHat or anyone else. If it's the black market you're talking about (or the "gray market"), and MS putting out boxed sets that claim to be official Red Hat software, then I doubt that MS is worried enough about RedHat's income enough to risk anything that close to being illegal. (They generally only engage in blatantly illegal activities when there's a lot of money to be made off it.) If they take out RH, then there are several hundred other distributors to jump into the gap.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[10Ghz]

Is there a need for step 3?

Money for Lawyers

[L-s-L69]

They are goin to need all that cash to pay an army of blood suckers to fend of the laughable accusations of SCO

It's the distro I use

[ODD97]

But I haven't paid for it. I'm still using the demo account.

Sure, it doesn't act like "real" Linux for a lot of things, but it's very painless to install and very easy to run. It's almost to the point that a non-geek could run it.

And sure, they haven't directly contributed much in the way of new code, but they're been a big cash cow for a number of project developing groups.

Go RedHat!

Re:It's the distro I use

[innosent]

Exactly, it may not be a person's favorite distribution, but RedHat has done, and continues to do a lot for Linux. Personally, I use Gentoo, but I'm happy to see a company succeed that puts as much legal, economic, and coding effort into Linux as RedHat does. It seems like RedHat and SuSe are behind a lot of good media coverage, and are usually the first ones to step up when needed (SuSe in Europe, and RedHat in North America, like in the SCO case).

Sure, they sell a free product, but what they're really selling is updates, pretty manuals, and their continued commitment to Linux, and support. Without RedHat and SuSe, Linux would probably be three years behind where it is now, and you wouldn't see as many companies switching to Linux, and as many Linux stories in the news.

Re:It's the distro I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed on many points, I too am an avid redhat fan, simply because I can safely recommend it to non-tecchies, making the job of Linux advocacy in a M$ company that much easier.

Redhat HAS contributed to Linux though; a lot of kernel drivers, Ximian and GNOME and GnomeOffice code, and, of course, the entire RPM system which is used by a majority of Linux distros.

I agree about Redhat moving away from *true* Linux though, but this is just their default installs. I tend to recommend stock Redhat installs, and then a 'roll-your-own' kernel, and then trash most of the RPMs installed, install just what you want manually, etc.

Re:It's the distro I use

[minus9]

"And sure, they haven't directly contributed much in the way of new code"

Yeah Redhat and its employees like Alan Cox have hardly contributed anything!

Re:It's the distro I use

[ultrabot]

Sure, it doesn't act like "real" Linux for a lot of things,

Examples? Gentoo diverges most radically from the "real" Linux way of doing things, followed by Slackware. Red Hat is pretty conservative regarding this stuff, i.e. it uses sysvinit and does pretty much everything in the way things used to be done.

Re:It's the distro I use

[Sj0]

This makes no sense to me -- care to elabourate? Do you mean that Red Hat doesn't include the real "Editing files in /etc by hand instead of using a pretty tool" Linux experience? If so, I recommend Windows 95, disk version for the true Windows experience.

Re:It's the distro I use

[Anonymous Coward]

If I use a toilet instead of crapping in a hole in the ground does that mean that I am not a "real" crapper.

Re:It's the distro I use

[digitalunity]

Ahem, Slackware is very much old-school. A lot of it, especially the scripts are very obviously BSD-ish, which would make it exactly 'the way things used to be done'. Anyone coming from a commercial Unix would find the transition easiest with Slackware. You are right in that Gentoo is a little off the wall, but Slackware is very traditional in many aspects.

Re:It's the distro I use

[ultrabot]

You are right in that Gentoo is a little off the wall, but Slackware is very traditional in many aspects.

Yes, but not "Linux-traditional".

Re:It's the distro I use

[pe1rxq]

Since slackware is the oldest surviving distro around you could almost say it is the definition of "Linux-traditional".... You probably mean something like "Linux-popular"

Jeroen

Re:It's the distro I use

[DanV]

Without RedHat or SuSe, we would probably have some other distros being in the same spot.
RedHat and SuSe arent special in any way - they just had better market plans, and recived better support.
Dont forget Mandrake in France, though. Just because SuSe is being heavily used in Germany doesnt mean it is being in used all over Europe.
Dan

Re:It's the distro I use

[ultrabot]

You probably mean something like "Linux-popular"

"Traditional" implies a degree of popularity. It's the way most distributions do things, the way that is taught at various Linux courses...

But this is all semantics.

Re:It's the distro I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Traditional" implies a degree of popularity

No, it doesn't.

"Traditional" implies TRADITION - you know, as in "the way things have always been done"

Slackware, being the oldest survivng distro, would be doing things the traditional way.

It's the way most distributions do things, the way that is taught at various Linux courses...

Which has NOTHING to do with tradition.

Next time, don't try to redefine a word to make yourself look good - you just make yourself look like more of an idiot that you already have.

Re:It's the distro I use

[revtom]

It's the distro I use at home and at the server farm with which I work at my job. All of us systems persons at work could build our own distro if we wanted (we're all LI/U-NIX geeks). When Red Hat gets us 95% of the way there, we have no reason to build our own ($t2 - $t1 = $money). I don't build my own distro at home, because I have a life (as hard as that is to believe). I started to build my own Linux-from-scratch, but other committments got in the way (wife, family, etc.), so I decided to load up RH.

We chose Red Hat, because at the time we introduced Linux to the server farm, RH7.2 was the best ready -made distro for our purposes (with only a few tweaks). Now, other distros, I'm sure, would do just dandy, but RH is our standard and there is no reason to switch except for the sake of switching.

I now run tweaked RH9 (KDE) at home. The more I use it, the more I wonder why we don't dump MS all together at work. Maybe someday...

Anyway, It is good to see a open source based company actually making a profit. One of the major factors when making major corporate purchases is if it believes the company will be there 10-20 years from now. Up to a few years ago, MS was the only one (maybe Apple?) that could claim that on the desktop OS side, where the big money is. Now maybe RH, SuSe, and if the East Asian aggreement materializes, we'll have three more "solid" companys to choose from for OSs in the corporate world.

Re:It's the distro I use

[schon]

Yes, but not "Linux-traditional".

Yes, "Linux-traditional"

Since the Linux startup grew from BSD-style Unix startup, Slackware IS the most "Linux-traditional".

This is obvious to anyone who knows the roots of Linux.

Re:It's the distro I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat is pretty conservative regarding this stuff, i.e. it uses sysvinit and does pretty much everything in the way things used to be done.

No, it doesn't. Things used to be done BSD-style.

Sounds like ultrabot doesn't know his Linux history.

Re:It's the distro I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop kissing people's ass.

Re:It's the distro I use

[MobyTurbo]

Since the Linux startup grew from BSD-style Unix startup, Slackware IS the most "Linux-traditional".

This is obvious to anyone who knows the roots of Linux

I remember running Linux kernel 0.95, shortly before there *was* a Slackware; needless to say, the boot-root disks did not contain any particular init system. :-) It was completely LFS before there was such a thing.

Until SLS told Slackware to stop imitating their init system and make their own, the famed Slackware BSD-init system did not exist. (This is not a put-down of Slack, just a historical observation.) There is no such thing as a standard "Linux startup", Linux is just a kernel, a kernel that is somewhat SysVish at that. The rest is distro-specific.

Re:It's the distro I use

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hats dead, so is SuSE when SCO gets done with IBM, I cant wait for the whole Linux movement to die.

Re:It's the distro I use

[ultrabot]

"Traditional" implies TRADITION - you know, as in "the way things have always been done"

Exactly, and the "way things have always been done" implies that more than 2 guys have done them that way.

(hypothetical

I created my own disto based on Linux kernel 0.1, the year it came out. It executed a random program on boot, and reboots. I hereby declare this mode of operation as the "Traditional Linux way".
)

Next time, don't try to redefine a word to make yourself look good - you just make yourself look like more of an idiot that you already have.

Thank you Mr. Coward. Your insight is always appreciated.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Dancin_Santa]

I think it's

3. Pray to god that you can ride out the dot com crash on the enormous amount of VC cash you got early on

Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[HanzoSan]

I think the old model of selling products is dead anyway, its dead in the music industry, its dead in the software industry. Theres only so much software you can sell to people, what? You think Microsoft's model would work in the third world? You are wrong.

Redhat actually has a better long term model, a service model which will work despite the changes in economy. The service model basically says, take our software for free, but if you want help using this software, sign up for support.

This will work great for Operating Systems, Microsoft could easily give away Windows and charge for support, antivirus, upgrades, etc. China is now moving toward Linux, when big governments such as these move toward Linux, this means the revenue stream grows x10, government has the money to buy support, and they are the kind of customers who cannot afford to make mistakes and are likely to buy support.

School systems also are the type of customers, businesses I think at least the small to medium sized businesses can use the support, the large businesses can hire their own experts.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Com2Kid]

Oh come on people, stop modding up obvious karma-whoring / trolls.

(selling software is not dead, saying it is not interesting, kthxbye)

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[torpor]

Sorry to say this, but selling software is dead. There is no money to be made in it. ;)

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[FrozenDownload]

Sorry to say this, but selling software is dead. There is no money to be made in it. ;)

lol! someone tell microsoft this... i bet someone will get a good laugh out of it. ;p~ (i get the hint of sarcasm unless im mistaken)

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[holgie]

BULLSHIT!
Redhat is one success amongst thousands of failures!
AND notice the revenue - 28 mill! That is _nothing_ absolutely incomparable with microsoft revenue.
AND what's the crap about the music industry being dead?! I will bet a sixpack (end then some) that the music industry has yet to foster a few millionaires - maybe even some billionaires! How many billionaires do you find at Redhat?
-
How many NASA managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? "That's a known problem... don't worry about it."

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[HanzoSan]

You actually think Microsoft can keep doing this? Even Microsoft knows they cant get away with selling Windows and Office for much longer, thats why they want to sell tech support and upgrades now, or at least are discussing the idea.

Face it, why will anyone use Microsofts crap when its being flooded with worms and viruses and costs $300?

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[bhima]

Selling digital things may not be the best business model, but selling physical things and services is still going strong.

I'm starting to be reminded of Larry Niven's comments on governments based on water monopolies. They retain power even though they have decayed, until an outsider comes along and makes them collapse. These business models based on content distribution, marketing and talent identification are getting long in the tooth!

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[hamster foo]

Redhat's business model is certainly a success but with Microsoft posting $8.07 billion in revenue and $1.92 billion in net income, it's pretty ridiculous to say that selling software is dead. I'm sure record industry numbers would probably support that their industry while in a slump isn't exactly dead either. Both business models have a place and are not mutually exclusive.

On another note, large corporations probably do more to support Redhat's business model than any of the other entities you listed. We have contracts with vendors for just about every product we use. Yes, we also have "experts" on staff, but vendors are called on quite a lot to deal with issues with hardware and software.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the old model of selling products is dead anyway

95% of all software companies disagree, including giants like IBM and Microsoft. Considering the number of "support only" companies veruses the number of companies that sell both software and support wouldn't you say so?

Redhat actually has a better long term model, a service model which will work despite the changes in economy.

Think again my friend. If the economy TOTALLY went down the crapper Red Hat could be supported by dirt cheap armies of people who have used Linux for years. That and well, the source is out there so it's not too difficult to hire a couple coders and fix things yourself.

and they are the kind of customers who cannot afford to make mistakes and are likely to buy support.

First, I have heard Red Hat's support is horrific. Like it or not that's what people tell me. Second, if you can't afford to make mistakes, hire your own coders and sysadmins. What's easier, to sue someone and hope you win or fire a coder who breaks your super duper mission critical system?

You have some truly "pie in the sky" ideas about how things work these days and how they'll work in the future. I appreciate your ideas but some of your statements are ludacris.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[hamster foo]

Here is the report those numbers come from if anybody is interested. Forgot to include a link in the previous post.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[HanzoSan]

Its dead, the only reason Microsofts numbers are so inflated is due to anti trust and other illegal tactics. When you have a monopoly you can force people to buy your software by packing it into ever PC sold, and you can set the price to be high $300 or maybe $500.

This however cannot be sustained forever, eventually OEMs will begin to pack Linux, people in the third world will eventually stop buying, Linux will have such a high marketshare that Microsoft wont have a monopoly anymore and economics will come into play.

Thats what happened to the record industry, P2P removed the distribution monopoly they had and their whole business fell apart.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Redhat actually has a better long term model, a service model which will work despite the changes in economy."

Why is the parent post modded up? Doesn't anyone actually read the reports they are giving?

Most of Redhats revenue comes from selling per-seat licenses of the "Linux enterprise linux", not services or support. Both service and support business are low-largin, low-salary businesses, more and more of that will be outsources over the next few years.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Face it, why will anyone use Microsofts crap when its being flooded with worms and viruses and costs $300?

I have two words for you ssh expoloit

Since SSH is very common, if not standard on almost all Linux distros someone could have easily written a worm to go out and do the same thing Blaster did.

I'm sure you'll say you can turn off SSH but that's the equivalent of shutting off RPC on Windows machines, you lose the ability for almost all remote administration.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I am willing to pay for software that solves particular problems. The thing I find most troubling with Windows Apps is that it very often did not, or it did for a while and then broke on the next release, or by installing some other app(dll).

At least with open source solutions I can fix it if no one else has. Things are still far from perfect though, as stuff breaks with new RH distros as well!

Getting yearly "service" is not such a bad idea, my only concern is that sometimes I simply will not be able to afford it. What then, my computer stops working? Or doesn't get needed security updates. In that case it's nicer to have paid up front.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Strudelkugel]

China is now moving toward Linux, when big governments such as these move toward Linux, this means the revenue stream grows x10, government has the money to buy support, and they are the kind of customers who cannot afford to make mistakes and are likely to buy support

So it's up to China to advance the cause of OSS? You might want to have a look at their <sarcasm>altruistic</sarcasm> actions during the "Great Leap Forward", "Cultural Revolution", at Tianenmen, and in Tibet... The PRC is not interested in spending a dime with foreign companies if it can avoid it, among other things.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[hamster foo]

People are buying those computers, and the boxes sitting on the shelves at Wal-Mart. It doesn't really matter how they got there. Selling software is FAR from dead at the present. You are claiming your perception of the future as the present.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have a monopoly you can force people to buy your software by packing it into ever PC sold, and you can set the price to be high $300 or maybe $500.

Oops, you forgot that Microsoft charges OEMs less than $40 for Windows.

eventually OEMs will begin to pack Linux, people in the third world will eventually stop buying

Probably not considering the amount of software piracy in Asia.

Thats what happened to the record industry, P2P removed the distribution monopoly they had and their whole business fell apart.

Yeah, I hear the music industry is dead. Oh wait, it's not.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[minus9]

Yes. Any company smaller than Microsoft and that doesn't have several billionaires on staff must be considered unsuccessful. I find your ideas fascinating and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[HanzoSan]

Yes so if I am president of China and I say only Linux can be sold in stores, and in response everyone in China buys Linux, does this mean Linux is a better product?

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[HanzoSan]

Thats not the point. China creates market share, their governments wont spend a dime on us, but their people will be using Linux allowing game companies to develop, software advances, and this in the end will allow our companies to offer services to the Chinese, not the Chinese government.

The Chinese will use our services if we are the only ones providing them, just like the Japanese, also we can buy their services, games etc, overall competition helps the industry.

Maybe Chinas version of Linux will be better than Redhats.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[jgisclon]

people in the third world will eventually stop buying

Typically people in the third world pirate Redmond's products a helluva lot more than they buy them.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody said RedHat was unsuccessful, but you cannot reason that commercial software companies have a dead business model simply because an open source company had limited success.

The fact that microsoft has several billionaires on staff only proves it.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Com2Kid]

LOL! Nice one.

Ok, listen, to anybody out there who doesn't get it;

LEAVE YOUR ROOM AND VISIT A STORE SOME TIME.

As long as my local Target is stocking Hello Kitty computer games, you CANNOT tell me that selling software is not successful.

Note that those of us who play GAMES (remember those?) tend to buy a lot of software.

As to movie studios. Yes yes, The GIMP is being used in some places, but so is Maya, guess which one has a larger professional user base?

Nothing to see here, and the next moderator who selects "informative" or "interesting" in this thread rather than "funny" deserves to get slapped.

Unless of course they select informative just to BE funny.

In which case it is excusable. *G*

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[hamster foo]

I have no idea what the point of that post was.

This isn't about whose products is better. Nor were any claims made regarding Microsoft or Linux being better than the other.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Com2Kid]

• 
  Speaking of Karma whoring, is it Karma whoring to make a post thats completely off topic?
  
  I guess the mods like to mod trolls today, including you.
  

This is /. ;

You mean we have topics? Oh, when did they implement those? :)

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Com2Kid]

*sigh*

This is irritating.

Home user market != important, nobody really gives too much of a care.

The market for programs like Maya, 3D Studio Max, Photoshop (which I am more than willing to PAY to use rather than The GIMP), Rhino3D, and, err, well anything else over the $400 price tag, is what is truly important.

Things that companies order thousands, if not tens of thousands, of copies of at once, also help. This is where Microsoft gets most of its money from, just imagine how many copies of Word (whatever version) are installed throughout nearly any one of the Fortune 500 companies.

The home users could go and shoot themselves for all it mattered, the professional and business markets are where the money is at.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[vadim_t]

Nope, selling software is a very risky business. It works for some, but it's a very risky business these days.

Games and Maya sell just for one reason: They provide something not available anywhere else. There are very few programs that provide unique funcionality out there: 3DS Max/Maya/etc, vmware, big databases, etc. Nearly everything else, as operating systems, compression programs, text editors is available for free.

For Microsoft the reason they earn so much is that they sell to OEMs and businesses. Most normal people just get a copy from their friend. MS would be bankrupt long ago if it didn't have companies buying massive amounts of Office licenses.

To try to sell your own software these days is a pretty bad idea. Come on, just try to sell your own tool. Ask the thousands of shareware authors if they ever got more than $100 from all their users. And now Linux is starting to provide for free the only two product they have that are profitable. Yes, MS released a statement that said that only Windows and Office are profitable. Nearly everything else loses money.

These days it seems much easier to earn money by consulting, writing custom programs, support, maintenance, etc. And it looks like it's only going to go even further that way with time.

People will indeed pay if they have specific needs. That's why the Freenet project is managing to pay a programmer while having a small user base. But there are really few unique projects like that.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[HanzoSan]

When did we even mention the home users? My point is, big corporate users are the first to migrate to Linux and the benefits will hit the home users later.

This means as more corporate users switch from word to Star Office, the benefits to open office are passed on to the home user.

People do not want to pay $500 for software every few years, the corporations dont want to pay it, the user cannot afford to pay it, and its just not going to work. People will however pay $500 in services.

The professional and business market (small and medium sized businesses) are where the money is at, but I'm a user, and it benefits me to get free software, I dont have the money to pay for the support, and its not important for me to have the support, if I were running a business I would definately go with Redhat.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Face it, why will anyone use Microsofts crap when its being flooded with worms and viruses and costs $300?

I have two words for you ssh expoloit

You're pathetic.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[holgie]

Well - maybe you should read a _little_ bit more thoroughly....
I wrote: Redhat is one success amongst...
- i.e. I _do_ consider Redhat a success. BUT that doesn't account for a trend, since most other aplying the same business model have failed utterly - I am as sorry as you are about that. But please... don't confuse your sympathy with your facts. It's not geeky - it's not even naive - it's stupid.
Declaring the music industry and Microsoft dead is a nice thought, but very very silly.
-
CONSUMER NOTICE: Because of the "Uncertainty Principle," It Is Impossible for the Consumer to Find Out at the Same Time Both Precisely Where This Product Is and How Fast It Is Moving.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Jaysyn]

Heh, cause that's what AutoCAD runs on, and AutoCAD is what the customer wants their drawings done in. See also: ArcGIS, MapInfo & LODE Data Corp.

Jaysyn

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to research at an English university, most people still don't know what Linux is.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[LordNightwalker]

Yes yes, The GIMP is being used in some places, but so is Maya, guess which one has a larger professional user base?

FYI, Maya is also available for Linux. Not trying to disprove your point though; lots of software companies use is available for Windows only, and that's what keeps lots of computers running it still.

But Maya was just a bad example. ;)

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[ichimunki]

Exactly, the widget approach is not viable unless you can find and enter a niche as it emerges. I mean, good luck writing a word processor and getting it to take off!

Writing software is a service. And most of the software written is written on that model-- coders are hired to write specific stuff. And a large base of Free Software only makes that easier. After all, the defining point in any transaction is where utility for the customer meets price. Free Software lowers the barriers to entry for the coder (who won't have to code or purchase extensive libraries to get an app up to speed), this passes through as a cost savings for the customer. Plus, wise customers will love using Free software as it prevents them from being locked into a vendor. Witness the rising trend outside the U.S. towards governmental usage of open software. They know better than to risk having their IT infrastructure held hostage like that.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[LordNightwalker]

You have some truly "pie in the sky" ideas...

Did anyone say pie?

Oh, btw, it's ludicrous...

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Daniel Phillips]

with Microsoft posting $8.07 billion in revenue and $1.92 billion in net income, it's pretty ridiculous to say that selling software is dead

What is dead, or walking wounded rather, is the ability to sell commodity software for the markups Microsoft is used to. In other words, Microsoft better get prepared for a world in which each copy of Windows brings in 10% of what it used to, and MS Office brings in 3%.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[mr_sas]

hahaha, you really think that people in China would buy games? Half the Windows game developers already won't sell there because of piracy. I can just see the game publishers now

A: "so whaddya think about this new linux thingy"
B: "uhh"
A: "well they've got a market share of 1.2 billion now"
B: "aren't they all chinese though"
A: "oh yeah, screw that"

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

My local corner store is also a success among many thousands of failures. How many businesses do you think actually succeed at all, out of interest?

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Andrewkov]

Interesting link ... Microsoft spends more on Marketing and Advertising than it does Research and Developement.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Apreche]

People think, ok China moving to linux big deal. Or they say, ok big deal, but not anything amazing.

China moving to linux is huge. Think about it, over 1 billion people will use linux isntead of Windows. Microsoft could have potentially sold a billion copies of windows for $100-$200 each. Now, much much less will be the case.

Now, with a billion linux users I'm sure at least a few of them will have technical problems. Someone who offers linux support in Chinese for a reasonable price could stand to profit considerably...

Red Hat isn't my particular choice of distro, but hey, linux companies doing good = good news.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[John Allsup]

Hmmm... where to start....


People think, ok China moving to linux big deal. Or they say, ok big deal, but not anything amazing. China moving to linux is huge.

Maybe. Many (myself included) will reserve judgement.


Think about it, over 1 billion people will use linux isntead of Windows. Microsoft could have potentially sold a billion copies of windows for $100-$200 each. Now, much much less will be the case.

You're falling into the erroneous thinking that the BSA likes to use in its marketing campaigns.
(Blindly translating numbers into potential $$'s)

Firstly, many in China cannot afford enough clothesto go round the family. Many are only slightly better off. How on earth can these be included in the 1billion potential computer users?
(Only when a country gets the general populous up to the levels seen in the West will computers become so ubiquitous.)

Of the millions in China with computers (the components are built over there, or in Taiwan, in most cases...) many will not pay for the software.
'Piracy' is rampant (as US software corporations like to shout about.)

In the end, you're down to a potential few million copies of Windows being sold. It's probably not that much bigger than one of the European countries.


Now, with a billion linux users I'm sure at least a few of them will have technical problems.
Someone who offers linux support in Chinese
for a reasonable price could stand to profit considerably...

And speaks the language natively, is familiar with the culture, grew up in it, etc. Basically it's a pretty closed market so far as money is concerned. What China wants out of Linux is to be sending less money to the US on account of running Windows, whilst still enjoying its trade principles (which is why it can't simply say Windows copyrights are null and void in China.)

What Linux has to gain from China is more open source software being written. The comments will probably be engrish, ASCII being to prodominant in programming languages to change in a hurry. With the way the GPL and friends work, it only takes someone to upload code to the internet for the OSS community to get hold of it.

In short, China, along with many other countries, does not present a market in quite as straightforward a way as you suggest.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[HanzoSan]

if its done right they'll have to pay for the service.

Dont sell the game as a product, let them connect to a network and access the games that way, or sell the game on a console, if you think China is so big with piracy well Japan wouldnt be able to sell anything like the playstation and other game consoles, Gameboy would be dead and there would be no video games.

Let the hardware makers find ways to handle piracy, the software makers just make the games and profit, the hardware makers could sell a box and internet access to games and suddenly you cant pirate because the games dont download.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the old model of selling products is dead anyway, its dead in the music industry, its dead in the software industry. Theres only so much software you can sell to people, what? You think Microsoft's model would work in the third world? You are wrong.

Redhat actually has a better long term model, a service model which will work despite the changes in economy.

Ignoring the karma whoring, you think Microsoft hasn't thought of subscription based software? Are you totally oblivious to .NET? xbox live? Besides, service and support isn't exactly a big revenue base in comparison to service, support, software and hardware.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[pauly_thumbs]

You are right but you are wrong -- RH is moving twords the MS model for doing business relying on OEM's and Re-sellers to do the selling for them.

thanks for coming out

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Pharmboy]

Redhat actually has a better long term model, a service model which will work despite the changes in economy. The service model basically says, take our software for free, but if you want help using this software, sign up for support.

This will work great for Operating Systems, Microsoft could easily give away Windows and charge for support, antivirus, upgrades, etc. China is now moving toward Linux, when big governments such as these move toward Linux, this means the revenue stream grows x10, government has the money to buy support, and they are the kind of customers who cannot afford to make mistakes and are likely to buy support.

You really hit on something here with your "Windows for free, pay for updates" statement. I have thought about this plenty, and found that I would sign up for this if MS would stop limiting how many workgroup clients you can use on xp home and pro, etc. For that matter, their existing price structure would be fine if they would remove those artificial/licensing policies.

If they just did like they did with WFW or Win95, where you connect all you want, how you want, easily and charge for automatic updates and applications. I wouldn't even care that it was closed source as long as they quit trying to "Netscape" everyone else in the industry. We wouldn't even be considering our migration to Linux.

The biggest blow MS could deal to Linux, however, would be to adopt this model. If they made it easy to copy Windows again for non-corporate use, and let you basically use it for free without any updates or support, then most companies would not consider switching simply because Windows is a known quantity, is pretty easy to use for most people, and the existing software base is huge.

If you could LEGALLY copy XP on all your boxes and only pay for the ones you want updates on (or pay for a corporate service plan) and you were responsible for the funding of IT, wouldn't you at least consider it? MS would still charge full for Office and other software, plus support, AV, services, etc.

If you didn't have to hassle with any of the client licensing garbage (or the wierd keys that want to call home when you change hardware) it would look pretty damn good.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[spiphy]

I find it interesting the the home user market is so often disregarded. Sure your average joe will not throw down the same amount of cash a business will but consumer spending is 2/3 of the U.S. economy. That means that the average consumer consumes and dose so a lot. Any business would be crazy to ignore that.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Rinikusu]

/* I think the old model of selling products is dead anyway, */

Pardon me if I have the wrong idea, but I just don't see selling blue-jeans on a subscription model. Or a toothbrush. Or toilet paper.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[mr_sas]

a linux-based console?

Slashdotter A: Cool a linux based console!
Slashdotter B: Copy Protection? I'm not buying this. My console is mine i should be able to run what i want on it, not what some insensitive mega-global-corporation says i can.
Slashdotter C:

1. Make unpirateable console
2. market to /. types
3. ???
4. Profit

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[mr_sas]

Seriously are you new here? An Infinium Labs type linux based console wouldn't be popular amongst developers due to the effort in porting games, plus i can't imagine a big company behind it.

A PC with hardware DRM would be the least popular thing ever on slashdot

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice troll!

Wow, you have it all: $100 total shareware revenue, normal people just get a copy from a friend, only 3DS Max and Maya are expensive, everything else is free.

Well done.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[clontzman]

Before you get too excited, so does Apple:

For the last quarter:

Research and development: $120M/7.8% of net sales

Selling, general, and administrative expenses: $299M/19.4% of net sales

That includes some non-advertising, retail-related expenses, but it's almost 3x as much. All those commercials ain't cheap.

Not that I'm saying that it's a bad thing -- I'm just saying that's it's probably true for pretty much any company.

Source: Apple's 10-Q

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[ppanon]

Typically people in the third world pirate Redmond's products a helluva lot more than they buy them.
Yeah, but there's also a helluva lot more people in the third world, so even with the higher piracy rates and lower computer usage rates, they are still a significant revenue source. So is Europe.
If MS only keeps its monopoly power in the U.S. that will significantly hurt their revenue. Eventually, when all those U.S. corporations see everybody else doing quite fine without Microsoft, if the costs of Linux are lower, they may not have a choice about switching if they want to stay competitive.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Strudelkugel]

Let's see what China does with books. This from the Wall Street Journal:

The Latest Adventures of Ha-li-bo-te

It's not a bad idea for a title: "Harry Potter and the Pirates." The Chinese-language publisher of the latest book about the boy wizard known in China as Ha-li-bo-te has decided to rush it into stores this weekend, 10 days ahead of schedule in a bid to thwart the copyright pirates who are already selling badly translated copies. "We found some Chinese versions translated on the Internet and some illegal versions of the book," a spokesman for the People's Literature Publishing House told the Associated Press. "We have read some of the books and found there are many mistakes and mistranslations." Chinese-language editions of J.K. Rowling's first four books have already sold millions of copies since their debut in October 2001, while world-wide sales of the books, in 50 languages, have topped 200 million. And this is far from the first time young Ha-li-bo-te has fallen victim to China's rampant copyright piracy. Last year, an unknown author produced an entirely new adventure, "Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon."

Want to see what Chinese Linux is like? Have a look at Thiz. Then run back to Red Hat/Slackware/Debian/SuSE... You won't be sorry.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[cybercuzco]

Duh, thats why apple died years ago. Oh wait...

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[aldoman]

No, because when you turn SSH off you don't loose the ability for programs too comunicate locally. Shut down RPC then try too copy and paste - it doesn't work.

Not only that most explots for Linux are:
a) moderatly hard too exploit, not just 'blaster.exe -IP'
b) usually always exist in a certain set of conditions, unlike Blasters 'all windows NT/2k/XP machines'.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[aldoman]

So true.

Most of the people I know just don't buy single player games anymore. They just download them or copy them. Buying a 52x32x52 CD-RW and a 25pack of CD-R is cheaper than a new game, so why should someone buy it?

They do however buy multiplayer games. Look at everquest, look at HL and BF1942. No-one pirates them, (well apart from half life) because the single player element is none-existant or so damn bad that you could cry. They have CDkey checks nowadays - and have done for some time.

I personally think the whole game industry is moving too a 'TV type' subscription. You pay $10/month too Sierra/Valve (which are doing this when HL2 is coming out, with Steam), and get access too all of their back catalog of games and multiplayer. You'd then subscribe too say EA's games, for $10/month aswell. We might even find that gaming publishers network - get an EA subscription and also have access too Sierra's too.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[aldoman]

And of course everyone would pay M$ if it was optional. M$ is a *huge* company now. It can't suddenly change its buisness plan overnight.

It's doing the same thing as it did 20 years ago, albeit on a larger scale. Moving from a mainly product based way of doing stuff too a subscription based one isn't easy, and M$ knows it wouldnt be able too pull it off. Can you see home user 'Joe' paying $10/month for 'computer interweb updates'? They don't even update it for free, and they don't buy OSes. They come preloaded with the PCs.

Maybe in a enterprise enviroment it might work, but in the home/small buisness, it's not going too happen.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[tijnbraun]

qoute: "That and well, the source is out there so it's not too difficult to hire a couple coders and fix things yourself."

And how much do you think that cost? A coule of (good) coders are not really cheap. For $1000 you could barely hire two for a day.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[tlahoda]

ssh exploit patch made available within 6 hours

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah who would have thought when Atari was making consoles that the japanese would over take the video game industry we created?

Dont you think that out of the billions of chinese that they can form their own game companies, make their own games and sell them to us? The Japanese did it, why cant they?

Nintendo isnt an American console and neither is playstation. Who said it needs Hardware DRM? Just dont put a harddrive on it big enough to store all of the games, let the game stream bit by bit via an internet connection.

Streaming games can work and you can have 3d graphics on the same level as games on a harddrive, massive RPGs use streaming, everquest and others.

So you simply have cache on ram, no harddrive at all, you can have maybe 2 gigs of ram, maybe 500 megs of harddrive space and a really fast CPU, the 500 megs of harddrive space would store the OS, the game would store on ram as its streamed or downloaded, and when you reboot the game is gone.

Let the pirates figure out how to save the game and even if they did they still would need an account to actually play it.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[s00p41337h4x0r]

95% of all software companies disagree, including giants like IBM and Microsoft.

Actually, companies like IBM, Microsoft, and HP have been making strong pushed to move to a services-based model. It's called on-demand computing and is the point of all of that computing-as-a-utility and grid-computing hoopla that we've seen in ads and articles recently.

Will they still sell their own operating systems and hardware? Sure. But, as we heard in Jim Gray's talk, the real money is in people's time, which translates to a service model.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

service model basically says, take our software for free.

A minor quibble...the software doesn't really belong to Red Hat. It's nice that they've had success, but the business model isn't really reproduceable for companies that develop their own software. The only way the service model has been proven is in the case where you have an open-source project that you can build your business around.

Do you actually think Red Hat would have posted a profit if they had to develop Linux and all the apps in their distribution in-house?

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[OwnedByTwoCats]

By "the same thing as it did 20 years ago", do you mean violating antitrust laws? And then signing agreements with the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice to stop breaking the law, and then ignoring those agreements?

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Com2Kid]

WinRAR, WinACE, both succesful startups after WinZIP had seemingly dominated the market.

Of course it helped that WinZIP's interface sucked massivly.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Com2Kid]

I have to agree that RedHat would make a good solution for Business users.

As a home user, it would drive me nuts, I tried it, and didn't work out at all. Windows is geared towards home users, towards people having a ton of programs being installed and removed constantly, towards things getting all twisted about and made weird as heck.

Linux does not bend well to having 50 or more end user applications installed, with who knows how many applications once installed and then removed, plus possible multiple versions of the same program existing where ever the user decided to thrown them, and so on and so forth.

Large hard drives of MP3s and videos? Screw that, I can fill up a hard drive with software!

And under Windows, all my software can become nicely integrated into my GUI with easy, easily accessible context menus kick ass. Right click a MP3, select encue, right click a JPEG, select either preview or edit, sweet. One goes to Ifran-View, the other goes to Photoshop. Yes yes, that can also be setup under most Linux GUIs, but the hassle, ickies!

For business users though, the environment is rather constant. Type, type, e-mail, browse some, heck not being able to install a gazzilion and one programs is a GOOD thing in those environments.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[vadim_t]

Oh yeah, WinRAR is pretty good. But few people use it, and I don't know anybody who registered it. And now that I found the GPLd 7-zip that compresses better I don't need or recommend it anymore.

Which is what I was pointing at. Yes, you can earn some money with your software. But you've got to be really really good. WinRAR, WinZIP are some of the very few shareware programs that got any money. For every one of those there's a thousand that will never pay for the developer's pizza.

That makes it a really crappy business model. I mean, I can easily buy fruit, potatoes, or whatever, and sell it without too much effort. I might not get a huge profit, but it's nothing compared to spending half a year on working on a program to then see that of 5000 people that downloaded only 5 bothered to register it.

Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, Maya is also available for Linux. ...
Maya was just a bad example

I think their point was that Maya costs money.

SCO Case

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think SCO's blathering would have damaged them, but they're actually up the last couple of quarters after posting some net losses in previous quarters.

-----------------

So, wouldn't this actually hurt the Red Hat case? I mean I thought they were building it on the fact that all the SCO FUD was hurting buisness.

Re:SCO Case

[bobintetley]

You'd think SCO's blathering would have damaged them

You would think, but I think the SCO case has actually done more good than harm. Why? Listen to the publicity SCO are putting out - they are complaining that Linux is too good, it has all these enterprise features normally found in proprietary UNIX and their products and services can't compete with Linux-based companies out there offering similar services.

I can just see IT managers out there going "has it? can it? It'll save me how much? I want some of that!".

How many more business people have heard of the Linux and free software as a result of this?

No publicity is bad publicity as the saying goes...

Re:SCO Case

[Anonymous Coward]

They can still claim massive damages, saying they would have gained a LOT more profit without SCO. Being in the black doesn't mean you were unaffected, it just means you rose above it

Re:SCO Case

[Cooper_007]

I don't know what came over me, but for some reason I chose to RTFA. Sorry.

to say it has not affected us would not be accurate; we continue to spend a lot of time with customers around this. Those who are sitting on the fence are using this as an excuse to continue to sit there

It's rather silly to deny that it's costing them revenue, but I suppose it's a sign of a good business when they manage to deal with it and still post a profit in the process.

Re:SCO Case

[screenrc]

How did you conclude that Red Hat was not
damaged by SCO? Red Hat might have been damaged
and its revenue could have been much higher,
but because of the Microsoft/Sun funded anti-Linux
campaing it did not show.

Just because revenues are not lower, we
can not conclude from this alone that they
have not been damaged.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for them! Mind you Ive been running RH since V5.6 (wow that was a fun install) and have never payed for a copy. Aah well....

Thank God for Debian!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a $ of profit made and not a $ of money paid ;-)

Re:Thank God for Debian!

[WindBourne]

Better than debian existing is the fact that you have a choice to choose from.

Re:Thank God for Debian!

[Anonymous Coward]

And it shows.

What's terrifying

[Anonymous Coward]

• Red Hat has a profit of $3 million this quarter
• Microsoft has so much money they can afford to just randomly toss off $8 million this quarter as a random aside just becuse dropping that money into keeping SCO afloat might generate bad PR from one of their competitors.

Implication: It is more than twice as profitable in the short term to become Microsoft's random lackey and wait for bribes from them than it is to make a useful, worthwhile product that competes with Microsoft.

Is this a sign of a company with too much power? Nahhhhhh....

Re:What's terrifying

[God! Awful 2]

Anybody remember the days when the naysayers said you couldn't build a viable business model centered around open-source software?

I don't think anyone is claiming that you can't make money with open source. The problem is that fewer companies will be profitable and those that are profitable will make less money.

Look at it this way, Red Hat is the poster child for open source and everyone here thinks it's a huge success when they make piddily amounts of money. What about the >$100 million they have already lost?

To put this in perspective, Red Hat made $200k from selling software and services last quarter. They made $3M in interest from all that money they have sitting in the bank. Practically speaking, they aren't so much a software company as they are an underperforming mutual fund.

-a

Re:What's terrifying

[TheRaven64]

Linux Sucks! Open source is evil! The GPL causes cancer! GNU is un-{nation of your choice here}!

Can I have $8 million now? (Yes, I have principles, and yes, I know exactly how much they're worth...)

Re:What's terrifying

[Jeppe Salvesen]

It is the job of the IT industry to enable their customers to do new things that weren't possible before, but also to make doing existing things cheaper.

The fact that there's less money to be made from selling software is good news for the economy. (Roughly speaking, there are exceptions..) They should be spending their money on business intelligence, not on infrastructure that is roughly speaking "solved".

Re:What's terrifying

[Daniel Phillips]

I don't think anyone is claiming that you can't make money with open source.

Not now, they aren't.

Re:What's terrifying

[Pharmboy]

It is the job of the IT industry to enable their customers to do new things that weren't possible before, but also to make doing existing things cheaper.

The fact that there's less money to be made from selling software is good news for the economy. (Roughly speaking, there are exceptions..) They should be spending their money on business intelligence, not on infrastructure that is roughly speaking "solved".

Nice point. Cheaper software makes it easier for small businesses to grow, and large businesses still need the support and tech's to impliment this software, so they hire, spend, develop, and contribute (via GPL). Anything that lowers the cost to start up and grow a business is good for jobs, good for the economy, good for consumers who now have more choice in the market place.

Personally, I have a few rhn $60/year basic accounts (and they just gave me one for free). I also have servers that do not have the service yet but still benefit from it. It is nice to contribute toward the success of open sourced software in a small way, but more importantly, they offer a killer service that pays for itself in the first month or two.

Being able to update several machines while I am at home, in a web browser, has allowed me to manage twice the servers. We use older servers, and tend to run ONE service on each box. Each box is configured as a backup server for another server, so we have great fallover protection. rhn is pretty stable and reliable. In almost two years, I have never had a problem with any updates it installs. You can even install and uninstall software remotely.

They have done a few things I didn't like, like cutting off support for 6.x and 7.x too fast. It WAS dumb of them to allow their certificate to expire, causing a problem where everyone had to manually download and install two RPMs for up2date.

But I can speak as a satisfied customer, overall. Their lowest tier of support (Basic Entitlement) is offering value and a very good service for many of us.

Re:What's terrifying

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I have $8 million now? (Yes, I have principles, and yes, I know exactly how much they're worth...)

I'll give you a dollar. It was pretty good, but you don't seem to have put much worth into it.

Do you have an MSN Money account?

-- William Gates III
(I cannot seem to remember my login password on this site. Is there someone I can e-mail about this?)

Re:What's terrifying

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat may be making less money, but there's no evidence that their software is any "cheaper" for the customer. RH's pricing is designed to be about the same as Microsoft's.

Re:What's terrifying

[God! Awful 2]

"I don't think anyone is claiming that you can't make money with open source."

Not now, they aren't.

Okay, haha...

But seriously, /. readers tend to take everything too literally. "You can't make money with open source" means "in general", not "there's no possible way".

I can't speak for everybody, but I was making the exact same point 5 years ago. In fact, read my sig; I make the same comment in my article.

-a

Re:What's terrifying

[Pharmboy]

RedHat may be making less money, but there's no evidence that their software is any "cheaper" for the customer. RH's pricing is designed to be about the same as Microsoft's.

Not true. Linux is not cheaper than Microsoft for everything, but it has saved in several ways. I am using several IBM dual cpu ppro 200 servers which will not operate with win2k3 server but install Linux just fine. I purchased 6 decked out used servers for $3,000. To buy new would have cost at LEAST $12,000 ($2000 x 6) plus $4800 in licensing. ($800 x 6) This is not including any licenses for clients, which would be another thousand. Instead we bought the 6 used boxes and downloaded RH9 for free, and paying for 3 basic entitlements. Our total expenses for 6 good servers (including unlimited client licenses) is less than $3500 including tax and rhn. For a Windows solution, it would have been at least $17,800.

We are looking at Linux on the desktop, but our estimates show its about the same price as Windows. Our motivation to change clients isn't money, its licensing and the BSA. I also have a problem with any software that limits how many clients you can connect, which is alot of software (including some software packages for Linux). I shouldn't have to pay for software based on how I use it, but rather how much support I need.

If I never use support, it should not matter if I have one client or one thousand since their cost is the same. Actually, their cost is less if there is only one version of the software instead of all the tiers and licensing stuff.

Re:What's terrifying

[Pharmboy]

I hate to reply to myself, but I found out why I got a free Basic entitlement, and wanted to share it. It is at http://www.redhat.com/software/rhn/offerings/ and has a chart of features.

They seem to giving you one free basic account when you buy your first one, so $60 gets you TWO entitlements. $60 each after that. Not a bad deal.

(no i don't work for them or own stock in them :)

I use Redhat myself

[HanzoSan]

I'm very pro Redhat, they make the best version of Linux in my opinion. Gentoo seems interesting but ridiculous to setup, Debian is too old and would require I upgrade every component after I install it, Redhat is easy to install and fairly up to date, its also easy to upgrade.

I dont very much care for the RPM system, I hate dependencies, I dont really like everything about Redhat, but it works so I use it.

Redhat has contributed new code, they are doing a good job at improving functionality. RPM while I dont like it does improve functionality, Up2date while I dont use it does help newbies, and bluecurve which I dont really like does make Linux easier to use.

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont very much care for the RPM system, I hate dependencies...

This is true of any package management system I've worked with.

RPM while I dont like it does improve functionality

Tracking what's installed, accurately upgrading and fully removing installed software must be fun.

Up2date while I dont use it does help newbies

Yeah, have fun spending 30 minutes everyday finding out what has changed. Then if someone has have even more fun manually downloading and installing it. That put together with you not using RPM must consume a hell of a lot of time that you could be spent doing other things.

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. With such a well informed, polite and helpful user community I'm surprised Debian isn't the No. 1 distro!

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Anonymous Coward]

With such a large following of morons like yourselves I'm surprised more people don't dislike redhat.

And no, redhat isn't the "No. 1 distro" dispite what they may tell you. They do have the biggest following of morons, I'll grant you that.

Re:I use Redhat myself

[digitalunity]

For a RedHat user, you sure don't seem to like much about the way it's set up. You sound like a hands-on, technically inclined person. IMO, you should consider Slackware if you decide to try anything else. It is by far the most stable of all the distributions out there and if you know anything about the workings of Linux, you will find it very easy. All of the packages are up to date and easy to install.
I don't personally like RPM either, so rpm2tgz is my friend. It does include RPM if you ever need it though. The BSD style init scripts are easy to configure. The file placement scheme is very well thought out, making modifications, program install/updates, whatever a breeze. The distro setup program is very easy to use making package selection a no-brainer, as well as setting up networking, pretty console fonts, whatever else you need.

For anyone who want's to get into the inner workings of Linux and really understand what's going on 'under the hood' so to speak, Slackware is a good place to start. It's easy to use, yet flexible enough to get real work done. What more could you ask for?
</plug>

Re:I use Redhat myself

[ichimunki]

How can you hate dependencies? Dependencies are a software fact of life. Or doesn't RPM automatically grab dependencies and install them like apt-get and emerge do? Doesn't RH have something called up2date or whatever that works more like apt-get?

Re:I use Redhat myself

[croddy]

both debian and redhat have their advantages. I run both redhat 9 and debian unstable at home and am highly satisfied with each of them.

redhat is very easy to install and configure, is mostly up to date, and security patches come out very quickly. given (basically) any intel/amd style hardware, I can usually get a redhat system booting within an hour with little tinkering. it includes the redhat-config-foo lineup, which make major system setup tasks very convenient; however, for the most part, redhat's configuration files and scripts are not 'managed' by the distribution. redhat also has a tendency to heavily patch some portions of the distribution (for example, the kernel and gnome/kde).

debian is far more difficult to install and configure (and the stable distribution is pretty old), but once done, updates and configuration are as simple as apt-get and dpkg-reconfigure -- switching to unstable will put most of your system ahead of redhat. the apt repositories are extensive -- for example, installing ardour on a red hat system will require quite a bit of hand-compiling and tweaking, but under debian it's nothing more than 'apt-get install ardour-gtk', with all the dependencies automagically computed and installed as well.

personally, I have abandoned up2date/RHN in favor of apt-rpm. the apt-rpm repositories *are* much smaller than the debian repositories, but they are a superset of redhat's own updates, and they include a lot of other things as well. for those who don't need/want a redhat support contract, apt-rpm provides much the same functionality as up2date, but without leeching off redhat's servers to get bugfixes and upgrades. an advantage to apt-rpm is that many, many 3rd party applications are available as RPMs -- and these don't tend to stress the RPM system as much as unofficial .deb's do.

they're different distributions with different purposes & I'd say each is the best in its class. kudos for a great 2nd quarter!

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use Redhat but thanks for playing, you fucking idiot.

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Dr_Claw]

both debian and redhat have their advantages. I run both redhat 9 and debian unstable at home and am highly satisfied with each of them.

<aol>me too!</aol> Choice is one of the greatest things OSS has given us. I love to embrace it.

personally, I have abandoned up2date/RHN in favor of apt-rpm.

I also use apt (or increasinly yum - which is the same kind of thing for those who haven't come across it). RedHat's base distro plus stuff from Fedora and the like and I'm set. It's worth pointing out that yum will be included in the next RedHat release (not sure about apt), with hooks into it from up2date!

they're different distributions with different purposes & I'd say each is the best in its class. kudos for a great 2nd quarter!

Seconded (to all of the above). There are [different] things I love and hate about each of RedHat and Debian, but they both do excellent jobs. I hope they both continue to be successful and improve.

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people speak really slowly when talking to you?

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Lodragandraoidh]

I run slackware and redhat - and much prefer slackware, as well.

If I had the time, I would build my own distribution; given that I don't have the time (spending that time, instead, raising my level of slack), slackware comes closest to what I would build for myself (lean, mean, and full of slack).

Plus, you have the added benefit of COTSG propaganda infusing every release with subgenius goodness... :)

I first loaded RedHat at version 5.1 - and it was very good, on a par with most distros of the time. Now it has drifted away from its roots (I hate the new Redhat desktop themes - not enough slack).

Unfortunately, I think alot of businesses go with Redhat because of the support options not present in other distributions. Businesses have to have a frigging support contract on everything (even though we end up supporting ourselves because vendors never meet our expectations or the intimate knowledge of our systems that we have). I think its just wasted money that a streamlined system tailored to our needs would better serve - such as a tweaked slackware distro.

Got Slack?

Re:I use Redhat myself

[aldoman]

Use APT-RPM and synaptic. Gives you that lovely APT system from debain, and also a GUI so you can look at eye candy :). Automatically checks, downloads and installs dependencies too...

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is by far the most stable of all the distributions out there and if you know anything about the workings of Linux, you will find it very easy."

Would there be any proof that slackware is really the most stable? I would really like to see that. If not, you could just stick with describing the actual distribution instead.

Re:I use Redhat myself

[Anonymous Coward]

Check Bugtraq, asshat. It's pretty ovbious when the whole world announces another PAM-related security hole that they've made some crappy design decisions that Slackware hasn't made.

Re:I use Redhat myself

[tigga]

I run both redhat 9 and debian unstable at home and am highly satisfied with each of them.

How come you satisfied with them if they are unstable?

;)))

Re:I use Redhat myself

[djaburg]

Try apt-get update and then you don't have to worry about figuring it out on your own. Then again, I hear that Windows Update works well too. ;-)

28 million ain't bad but....

[dood]

... that's what Microsoft or Oracle make in a week. I don't think the OS business model is quite there, yet. ;)

Re:28 million ain't bad but....

[kanda]

20 years back thats what people might have said about Microsoft and IBM - IBM makes in a week what Microsoft makes in a quarter or year. :-)

I am not saying that the open source business model is a winner, it may still fizzle out. But the trouble is if you wait till a business model is proven, then it may be too late and it won't be easy to get in. The trick is to spot a winner early on. Certainly the open source business model is a serious candidate.

Re:28 million ain't bad but....

[NineNine]

... that's what Microsoft or Oracle make in a week.

Actually, that's closer to one day for Microsoft.

Re:28 million ain't bad but....

[kilgortrout]

Maybe true enough, but microsoft certainly sees open source as a significant threat to its continued success and with good reason; it is.

Re:28 million ain't bad but....

[GauteL]

Why not? Why does one have to earn millions of dollars each day for anything to be viable?

Red Hat have said this themselves before. They do not believe that they will ever be a cash cow like Microsoft, but they think they can make a pretty decent living for a number of people. Why some people bought into the idea that they would take over from Microsoft beats me.

Re:They must be doing something right?

[CAIMLAS]

And I s'pose you pay for all the software you use, right?

By that I mean, "pay the market price for each individual program", not "paid for shareware once because you couldn't find a crack".

Only the beginning...

[Catcher80]

I hope more big companies and more individuals will start to realize that Microsoft isn't the ONLY way to go! Espicially when open-source out there. Hell, it's almost easy enough to dive in the code yourself to learn how to tweak it...

I'm getting tired of seeing Billy Gates on the top of the money list anyway..

Ok that's one.

[MisterFancypants]

On this thread, there seems to be a lot of speculation going on about how OSS business models can be successful based on the success of one company.

I have no specific opinion on how viable Open Source software sales can or should be, but a sample size of one success is hardly scientific proof that it is a viable business for others to get into...

Re:Ok that's one.

[RedWizzard]

I have no specific opinion on how viable Open Source software sales can or should be, but a sample size of one success is hardly scientific proof that it is a viable business for others to get into...

Actually it is. It's working for RedHat so it's clearly a viable business model and it can work for others. Whether a specific company can execute it sucessfully is another matter but the business model is proven in the conditions that exist at this time.

Re:Ok that's one.

[varjag]

I have no specific opinion on how viable Open Source software sales can or should be, but a sample size of one success is hardly scientific proof that it is a viable business for others to get into...

Yes, it makes no implications on how easy is to build a buisness around Open Source software, nor it illustrates what would be your chances of survival if you choose that path. It proves, however, that it possible to have a successful business selling OSS, which is fact of its own worth.

Remember the hordes of naysayers that predicted imminent death of RedHat, and all the armchair analysts declaring that there is no business model for Open Source.

Re:Ok that's one.

[Jade E. 2]

Well, there are more companies than just Red Hat trying to make money off of Linux. Off the top of my head, I can name Transgaming, Suse, Mandrake, VA Software, Loki, Corel, and Lindows. I'm sure there are more, but I'm tired and very sick right now. But just using those companies, it's a pretty scary picture.

Mandrake, Corel, and VA Software are all losing money. It's particularly impressive just how proud VA is that they've only lost 3.7 million in the first quarter this year, as opposed to the 9.8 million they lost first quarter last year. And you can't exactly claim it's starting losses either, all 3 have been around for years.

Transgaming doesn't have financial information on their site, but they're a tiny (20 employees according to this June article) private Canadian company. While that's great for those 20 people, I don't think selling access to freely distributable software and asking people not to distribute it is really a scalable business model. Lindows is apparently another small (they claim 50 employees when trying to explain why they charge for click-n-run, who knows if it's accurate or not.) private company.

And Loki... You know.

SUSE may be the only other major profitable company there, I can't really tell since they also don't list financial information. (At least, not on their English site, and not that I could find on their German site with Babelfish.)

So, out of 8 Linux companies, one is (maybe 2 are, if SUSE is good.) large and profitable, 2 are small and private, 3 are large and losing money, and one already went bankrupt. Still not enough to really mean anything, but not quite as happy a picture as just considering Red Hat.

Re:Ok that's one.

[thales]

It can work for others IF the market for Open source/Free software is large enough for more than one successful company, and that is a big if.

Re:Ok that's one.

[rmohr02]

You mention some good points, but there are many companies making a profit off of open source software other than Linux. MySQL, IBM, Trolltech, Intel, and Dell are just a few (yes, I realize some of these companies make money in other ways as well, but they all report their open source-related activities to be profitable).

Re:Ok that's one.

[watzinaneihm]

Well it atleast disproves the theory that you CANNOT make money on Opensource.
A sample size of one is enough to disprove that. About long-term sustainability of this model, We'll see.

Re:Ok that's one.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's working for RedHat so it's clearly a viable business model and it can work for others
Red Hat loses over $120 million in the last three years, makes $240,000 in one quarter (the $3 million was net income, NOT profit -- read the press release more carefully), and all of a sudden it's a viable business model?

Re:Ok that's one.

[irix]

there are more companies than just Red Hat trying to make money off of Linux. Off the top of my head, I can name Transgaming, Suse, Mandrake, VA Software, Loki, Corel, and Lindows

That is a pretty piss-poor list. VA Software is hardly making money off of Linux - they are a software vendor that runs a few Linux related websites. Corel is not a Linux company in any way and hasn't been for quite some time. Loki is a dot-com bubble company that is long dead from mismanagement.

Besides RedHat and SuSE there companies like IBM and EDS that are making a lot of money off of Linux installations and support (and selling hardware to go with Linux). There are also many companies making money in the embedded Linux market. There are also lots of small private vendors like Transgaming the TheKompany.

Do you want me to start listing software vendors that make money off of Windows that are in bad financial shape or bankrupt too? A bad buisness plan isn't exclusive to some Linux companies.

Re:Ok that's one.

[polyp2000]

Yep and what about the thousands of hosting companies and ISP's that sell linux accounts and virtual hosting ?

Re:Ok that's one.

[pantoniades]

hey, what about SCO? from what i hear they've made like $8M off linux this quarter.

useless programming

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't specify which foot is to be inserted into the mouth.

They need smarter vendors

[jsse]

We, along with many other companies around here, have serious enterprise deployment of Redhat Linux and Oracle, thanks to their Redhat+Oracle enterprise initiatives.

However their vendors don't seem to catch up with trend. I got many calls this week from a ASL sales asking for some clarification to our order:

"Are you sure you don't need Arcserve for Linux for your tape drive?...dar? oh tar...tar? I really think you need Arcserve for schedule backup....cron?...."

"Are you sure you don't need GEAR PRO for your CDRW drives? I believe you need it for writing some CDRW....I don't think there's any CDRW burning software bundled....what cdrecord?...."

"Are you sure you don't need any antivirus sof"

*DIALTONE*

tax?

[narkotix]

is that before or after the impending sco "tax"?

What language is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

insert(&mouth, FOOT);

eh?

Re:What language is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its the language for idiots who are trying to pass themselves off as C programmers.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[minus9]

1a. Invest heavily in open source development, quality assurance testing and support infrastructure.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[jsse]

I know it's just a joke, but RedHat really makes some serious contribution to the community. First it's a distro of its own from day one, rather than a straight fork from other distro; Second it constantly contributes back to the community with their huge development teams; third their keep bunch of maintainers(e.g. Alan Cox) well-fed so that they could continue with their contribution without worrying about their morgage. :)

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent post is spot on right. Redhat and IBM are _not_ open source success-stories since they only develop an marginally amount of free software themselves. Their main business is taking software someone else has done and rebrand it.

They both use open source authors as free labour.

Re:How does it feel ?

[innosent]

At the end it's all about $.

Wait, so we're capitalists now?... In America?... When did THAT happen?...

Full figures here

[dipfan]

Red Hat's SEC filing is here and show, among other interesting facts, that RH has $307m in cash in the bank, which is more than enough to pay for the lawyers to fend off SCO.

In many respects the six monthly figures are even better: a move from a loss of $6.3m in net income to a profit of $4.8m. Sure, a drop in the bucket compared with MS, but you've got to start somewhere.

Re:Full figures here

[Pros_n_Cons]

and show, among other interesting facts, that RH has $307m in cash in the bank, which is more than enough to pay for the lawyers to fend off SCO.

I don't agree, RH has more money sure, but SCO has nothing to lose, they are done, they know it. thats why all this started in the first place. RH is suppose to be a company of the future, how do they do that if they spend all thier money on a legal battle? while sco can just keep doing stock pumps and lobbying for cash to big corps?

Re:Full figures here

[swillden]

I don't agree, RH has more money sure, but SCO has nothing to lose, they are done, they know it. thats why all this started in the first place. RH is suppose to be a company of the future, how do they do that if they spend all thier money on a legal battle? while sco can just keep doing stock pumps and lobbying for cash to big corps?

If SCO threw everything they've got into the suit, RH could outspend them by 5 to 1 and still have $200 million left in the bank.

But SCO also has to fight IBM at the same time, so they can't afford to put all of their resources into the fight with RH, meaning RH can match and even exceed SCO's maximum effort without feeling much pain at all.

RH is very healthy and this legal battle will probably be to their ultimate benefit, even if it costs them $20 million, both because it will clear up potential concerns about the legal status of Linux and also because it's bringing a level of publicity even IBM couldn't buy, much less RH. I mean, even your average dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks CIO will realize that software that is the subject of a $3 billion lawsuit against the likes of IBM must be something more than a geek toy. And RH gets to have their name in all the newspaper stories, right next to IBM. What company wouldn't give anything to have their name on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, say, twice a month, particularly in favorable articles?

Of course SCO is also getting exposure, but it's tough to see how they're going to capitalize on it.

Re:They must be doing something right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry about vb.warrior, CAIMLAS. I think he's a troll-bot.

Vb.warrior, honey, put your your mom's bra back and stop touching yourself. Remember when you asked why the other kids don't like you? This is why. Go get some juice and go to bed, sweetheart. Tomorrow, maybe you'll meet a nice, drunk girl who will pity you enough to sleep with you. Won't that be fun? I'll be in to tuck you in in a second, pookie.

Selling Free Software

[Dancin_Santa]

Someone else mentioned that the selling of Free Software is somehow an affront to the people writing Free Software. They are probably modded down to -1 Flamebait by now.

They are wrong. When someone writes software and releases it under the GPL, they have set free another piece of software. It is really the most beautiful thing you could do for a piece of software, in fact. Without getting into the whole debate about whether it makes sense to anthropomorphize ideas and code by saying the overused phrase "Software wants to be Free", I will just sidestep the issue and say that as a moral developer I believe that software should be Free.

I didn't always feel this way. I used to think that software that I wrote belonged to me as a result of my thinking about it and transcribing my thoughts into Emacs. But this is wrongheaded thinking, and I was shown so by the FSF. It boils down to the fact that once I release my code from my brain it ceases to be mine. Whose is it, you ask. Well, if it doesn't belong to me, then it certainly can't belong to you either. It exists on its own as a Free entity.

Software makers use the artificial method of copyright to recapture this software and to claim ownership of it. This is not unlike the slave traders of old. I would go on here with the slave trader analogy because it is so completely apt, but experience in this forum shows me that most people here who claim to believe in the ideals of the Free Software Foundation simply do not understand the goals of the organization nor the fundamental reasons behind the movement.

So why is selling Free Software okay? Free Software cannot sell itself. It is an inanimate object and thus needs a broker to handle transactions for it. The broker can be as simple as a roommate copying a CD ISO or as involved as a complete corporation dedicated to distributing and supporting the software. Because the software is Free, it can go anywhere and do anything, but of course it needs someone to help it along.

Selling Free Software is good for Free Software. It is nothing more than a person or company taking a small fee for introducing the Free Software package to a new friend.

Re:Selling Free Software

[DaEMoN128]

I sorry, but I can just see this guy going, be one with the code. The computer is his home, just send him home happy. Enough of my sarcasm. I think it is good to see RH makeing money. I agree with mr software exists on its own. It is not an affront to people who write software to be free if someone else charges for it... provided you say its ok. It is a lot of work maintaining a stable distrobution. I personally dont use RH, I find suse allows me to be more lazy. Before everybody flames me, I can do it manually, but why when I dont need to? I support RH because they support the open source community.

Re:Selling Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, this shit is now modded +5. We can see how many blinded people exist in this community blindly following the hype of RMS. I bet that the majority of you people have absolute NO clue about GNU and (L)GPL. Be real here most of you open source followers simply put your work under GPL or LGPL because everyone else is doing so. I saw a lot of people joining our channel (of a major open source desktop) asking about what licensing model they should use to put their code under. This implies that the majority of people have absolutely NO CLUE what they are doing and why they are doing it. They are simply doing it because others do it. Like 'If your friend jumps off of an skyscraper you should too'.

Open Source is not bad if it's not abused or used wisely in this community as it was in the beginning around mid 199x but nowadays open source became one of the major outsourced communities around the globe and big companies make usage of this behaviour. What little kiddies (specially those hyping the hell out of open source) need to understand is that today things totally changed. It's not just about open soruce anymore. Big companies showed up make usage of this and abuse the work of others for their own commercial profit.

Open Source in terms of freedom is ok (some years ago) but is NOT anymore due to heavy ripoff and abuse.

People come up in channels and reply 'hey I would feel respected if others use my work'. Do you really feel respected if someone comes and fork your code ? I bet the majority of people simply feel pissed this to happen. I saw a lot of good projects died because some wannabe showed up trying to fork the code of others and miserabely failed. The initial maintainer then resigned as well because he was upset because someone was forking his baby.

Well I think what we need to do is getting back to closed source and have such assraping companies as Red Hat, SUN and others pay for license. At the end I want to make money too. I want to live, I want to feed my kids and pay my rent. I can't do this by coding for free and even open source and see how such companies 'hyped by kiddes' come up and rip all my work for their own business.

Re:Selling Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think that software that I wrote belonged to me as a result of my thinking about it and transcribing my thoughts into Emacs.

Enlighten me with the names of software packages that you have written and "set free".

Or are you the kind of guy who "talks the talk", but doesn't walk the walk?

Re:Selling Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kind of funny, you so obviously don't get the point...

Making money isn't the point of "free software", it's the idea of increasing the general pool of public knowledge and awareness.

And, as many many companies and individuals have learned through experience, basic research done this way is almost always a good thing - even sometimes becoming profitable. Deal with it.

Re:Selling Free Software

[mdielmann]

When someone writes software and releases it under the GPL, they have set free another piece of software. Software makers use the artificial method of copyright to recapture this software and to claim ownership of it. This is not unlike the slave traders of old...[Free Software] is an inanimate object

Which other of my inanimate objects require freedom today. My car? My house? Are we going to include their protection in our various countries' constitutions? Will they get to vote?

I don't mind the idea of free software, and intellectual freedom in general (note that this doesn't apply to copyright, which is another issue which 'copyleft' doesn't handle but the FSF does address) but your anthropomorphisation is a little too farfetched. Fact of the matter is, digital products are easy to copy, and so we look at them as being less someone's property than physical products (maybe with reason). Equating this to slavery is wrong and trivializes that crime. Slavery is objectionable to me, clearly to you, and most times to the slave. Copyright-restricted software isn't so objectionable to me (IP-restricted is a different matter again), apparently is to you, and neither of that matters so much in the whole 'software slavery' issue because the software doesn't give a damn! Even you aren't giving it a choice on whether it wants to be free. It is a thing, which can't be enslaved. Hell, even PETA and the nuttier animal-rights groups (whether PETA is nutty is an opinion you can form for yourself, but there are always more extreme groups...) wouldn't try to say that (about things and not creatures) with a straight face, and I'm surprised you could.

Re:Selling Free Software

[Zimm]

Software makers use the artificial method of copyright to recapture this software and to claim ownership of it. This is not unlike the slave traders of old. I would go on here with the slave trader analogy because it is so completely apt, but experience in this forum shows me that most people here who claim to believe in the ideals of the Free Software Foundation simply do not understand the goals of the organization nor the fundamental reasons behind the movement.

The GPL is a copyright, so you want all software to fall into the public domain? Are you a slave to the GPL? Your one of those that believe the GPL is a virus?

Just curious.

Re:Selling Free Software

[meadowsp]

Absolte rubbish, public domain (or BSD) are free because anyone can do what they like with them.

GPL isn't free because it places restrictions on what people can do with it.

Big difference.

Re:Selling Free Software

[gmhowell]

Ignore this man! He is a flaming communist. As I have pointed out elsewhere, he employs slave labor. With the red suit, he pretends to be a Communist. Perhaps he is, after a fact. A communist we all know and love: Stalin. He is adept at spinning lies to his brand of truth.

Remember, Dancing Santa=Dancing Stalin.

Re:Selling Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always viewed the statement "information wants to be free" to be less antropomorphism and more a restatement of "it's hard to keep a secret".

This was the original meaning (it was a cracker's term), but has been co-opted by the free software idealists.

Re:Selling Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the point of free software don't worry. The point is that it's abused by comercial interests.

Re:Selling Free Software

[drinkypoo]

Software makers use the artificial method of copyright to recapture this software and to claim ownership of it. This is not unlike the slave traders of old. I would go on here with the slave trader analogy because it is so completely apt, but experience in this forum shows me that most people here who claim to believe in the ideals of the Free Software Foundation simply do not understand the goals of the organization nor the fundamental reasons behind the movement.

The only way you could draw a meaningful parallel between copyright and the trading of slaves would be if the slave traders had made their slaves out of clay and breathed life into them. In addition, in the next paragraph you say "Free Software cannot sell itself. It is an inanimate object" and inanimate objects are tools to be used, not living things.

Copyright is an attempt to make a nontangible thing tangible in the eyes of the law, nothing more and nothing less. While you can never really achieve parity between the real and the virtual, you can bring them closer together.

It's not that free and open software does not belong to you, and it does not belong to me, it belongs to each of us equally because it is effectively in the public domain. (I know Public Domain means something specific, and neither GPL nor BSD nor any other license truly places items there, but please bear with me.) Thus, it belongs to the public. Nothing anyone does to it can actually disrespect the code itself. However, the author retains some ownership of their code in one respect under both GPL and BSD licenses, in that they deny permission to relicense it. The much-vaunted GPL cannot exist without copyright. Copyleft is not a direction we should be going instead of going right; it is complementary, and provides balance. But without copyright, GPL code would simply be in the public domain, and anyone could put it in their closed and proprietary software without the author's knowledge and consent.

In other words, software which is literally in the public domain is not truly free, but would be freer in the sense of being outside of control. The GPL is, simply, a way to use the system to fight the system, perhaps one day defeating it if you can point out its shortcomings. It does not give life to the lifeless.

Re:Selling Free Software

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"Software makers use the artificial method of copyright to recapture this software and to claim ownership of it."

So do people writing free software. Every GPL program is copyrighted, and Free software authors *do* claim ownership of their code. Knowing who "owns" which code is a very important part of free software projects.

The only difference between free software and proprietary software is what the license allows you to do. Microsoft forbids you from distributing their code. The GPL forbids you from incorporating it into proprietary code.

Thus, GPL'd code isn't really "free". Public domain code is - you can do with it what you like. The GPL restricts freedoms (the freedom to incorporate it into non-GPL projects, the right to distribute modifications without source) in order to encourage free software development.
This isn't necessarily bad.

Copyright is not like the slave trade at all. Ideas don't have rights. You are not "capturing" the idea. I believe that copyright and patents are important rights, so long as they are not abused. Imagine a world without copyrights - Microsoft could take the Linux kernel and incorporate it into their proprietary code - without giving credit or releasing the source code. I could claim your open-source code as my own, after all, there's no copyright. Want to develop a new drug? Too bad - as soon as you make it, you'll have to compete to sell it at $2.00 a bottle. How about an inovative new rocket engine? I hope you don't plan on selling it to NASA - they'd just make their own.

Without copyright, there would be no free software. Without patents, everyone would just keep trade secrets.

Copyrights and patents have been hugely abused in the past few years. That doesn't mean that they should be eliminated altogether.

I have rights to my ideas. Are they my property? No. Ideas cannot be property. But saying that they cease to be mine the instant they hit the paper is rubbish. My ideas are my own, and I believe that I should have the right to a limited-time monopoly on the reproduction of those ideas. 14 years, perhaps. I should have enough time to make some money off my ideas (if they are good), while allowing them to enter the public domain in a reasonable amount of time.

And, yes, I agree that you should be able to sell GPL'd software. Heck, it says so in the GPL itself.

Sidenote: You use free as an adjective in your post several times. In these instances, it is not a proper noun and should not be capitalized. Moreover, even when it is being used as a noun, "Free Software" is not necessarily a proper noun (in the same way that proprietary software is not), and thus it should not be capitalized.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

"1a. Invest heavily in open source development, quality assurance testing and support infrastructure."

Why would anyone invest heavily in open source development when there are lots of people doing it for free?

Yes, I know both Redhat and IBM gives away some minor software but it's an marginal amount.

"quality assurance testing "

Since Redhat and IBM doesn't make the software they can't guarantee any "quality assurance".

Support is an low-largin, low-salary business, not a growth-area. Most of the second-tier support (people fixing problems forwarded by phone-support vrew) will likely be outsources in the next few years,

Re:How does it feel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

When the US convinced the world to submit to economic bondage.

Re:They must be doing something right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont diss my hero bitch, that man is a god amongst you Linux weeny cunt babies.

And SCO claims OSS model "unsustainable"

[Solokron]

"Red Hat has defended its business model against a claim by the SCO Group yesterday that its dependence on open-source software development was unsustainable in the long term. " Hah! http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/os/story/0,200004 8630,20276904,00.htm

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[hdparm]

This is load of crap.

There are very, very few companies that contributed to Linux and open source in general as much as Red Hat did during last decade. In code, money, advocacy and jobs.

You suck. So does moderator(s) who think(s) every post that contains ??? is funny.

Re:Open Source is right!

[minus9]

Redhat has little say in what version of the kernel Debian ships and it certainly has absolutely no control over the compatibility between a Dell servers and FreeBSD. The only proprietary parts of Redhat are the free stickers in the box.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[j3110]

Hey, that's just not entirely true.

IBM released a lot of their own code into the Linux kernel, and they've released other great products like Jikes, JFS, Eclipse open source out of their own pocket.

RedHat has Alan Cox on staff, and a few of the drivers and a lot of utilities for Linux have been written by Redhat.

A lot of the software that Redhat distributes they aren't really involved in, but they aren't selling Linux anyhow. They are supporting Linux. By giving companies a safety net of support, they have switched a lot of people to Linux. This means more general software and hardware support for Linux. Before Redhat, you had to buy specific hardware in order to get it to work with Linux, but now pretty much everything has a Linux driver. If nothing else, they've at least got the support up for Linux enough that people will release specs for their hardware to people willing to right drivers.

kudos? maybe, but not for making money

[Anonymous Coward]

Cowboy Neal wrote:

" Kudos to Red Hat. They must be doing something right."

Uh, because success is measured in dollars, right? In that case: kudos to Microsoft. They must be doing something right. Kudos to Enron. They must have done something right. Kudos to penis-enlargement spammers. They must be doing something right.

"Making money" is not necessarily the same thing as "doing something right." Redhat may or may not deserve kudos - that's a separate issue - but if they do, it certainly isn't for having a bank account.

Re:kudos? maybe, but not for making money

[ddimas]

Actually they deserve kudos because they have been able to be profitable while doing something right.

As you pointed out it's easy to make money robbing people, especialy when the law allows it.

Re:kudos? maybe, but not for making money

[C_Kode]

You took his kudos out of context. In business it's about money. Making money in business means you are doing something right.

Anyhow, how did you associate Enron in this? Money is something they only claimed to of had.

GPL/Free Software and open source are different

[News for nerds]

Another group has started using the term "open source" to mean something close (but not identical) to "free software". We prefer the term "free software" because, once you have heard it refers to freedom rather than price, it calls to mind freedom.

Re:They must be doing something right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry. I'll try to refrain from dissing your hero bitch. I have no love for the Linux weeny cunt babies, either, but if you're going to troll, be funny.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone invest heavily in open source development when there are lots of people doing it for free?

Because no one wants to do the shit work that you still need to do to make a system "Enterprise" ready.

Since Redhat and IBM doesn't make the software they can't guarantee any "quality assurance".

Yes they can, and they do. They have a QA department that runs QA testing on software which they subsequently ship. Just because its Open Source doesn't mean you can't QA test it.

Support is an low-largin, low-salary business, not a growth-area.

If its not a growth area, whats with the growth of Redhat?

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Open Source developer, I'm quite happy to contribute my labour. Its not as if I could make a living selling a couple of hundred thousands of lines of code scattered across multiple projects direct to hundreds thousands of customers.

RMS harps on Freedom, but he's not clear enough

[Dancin_Santa]

The way he explains it, you would think that the Freedom that he speaks about is the Freedom of developers to do stuff with GPL'd software. This is not true.

The Freedom that he so ineloquently describes is Freedom of the SOFTWARE. The Software itself is Free, Liberated, Unchained, whathaveyou. Because it is Free and cannot be made UnFree (this is why the BSD and similar licenses are not Free Software Licenses; even the FSF is falling for the BSD linguistic trickery) you gain the benefit as a developer of all those wonderful things that RMS talks about.

But the key point is the the Software is Free. I wish RMS would stop confusing the issue by trying to make people think the GPL grants users extra rights because it doesn't. The GPL simply sets up a way for Free Software to never be made UnFree.

Re:RMS harps on Freedom, but he's not clear enough

[John Allsup]

The basic problem with RMS's positions on many things is that his views are based on idealism: the kind of 'right thing for society' that intellectuals like to debate. The problem is that idealism is not that great a motivator. Marxism may have been the starting point for the Soviet Union, but it took the arrogance of the Tzar and the mess being created by the Tzarina during WW1 for the people to get sufficiently motivated to ovethrow the previous rulers. (This is a gross oversimplification I know.)

So far as the software itself being free, that is a different, but still confusing way to explain the concept. What exactly freedom means for a human being is hard enough for interested parties to debate as it is. What does freedom mean for a computer program? Does a free piece of software have the right to refuse to be installed on a particular computer? (I know it often appears that GPL'd C sources have a right to refuse to compile, and the free will to exercise that right when they feel like it, but I suspect the cause of this is technical rather than political or philosophical...)

I'll not go on. Others can add thougts to this.

Re:RMS harps on Freedom, but he's not clear enough

[schon]

the arrogance of the Tzar and the mess being created by the Tzarina

Not to mention all the problems caused by their Tzardines.

*rimshot*

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to IBMs overall business their contributions are marginal.

Linux isa good way to get free labour of your a bigger service-oriented company like IBM.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm.. Your post has ??? in it. Hence i see it modded as funny. There is no other reason for it to be funny. :-)

OT: So, how is SuSE doing?

[ivi]

Does anybody happen to know how SuSE
- with its "demo-mode" CD-ROM d'load
(only...) is doing, ie compared with
RedHat, financially?

TIA

Re:OT: So, how is SuSE doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

SuSE also allows FTP installation of its latest distribution. It is a common misaprehension that they only supply "demo-mode" CDs.

Re:OT: So, how is SuSE doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

they only supply demo-mode CD ISOs

Re:OT: So, how is SuSE doing?

[hughk]

Suse is a German public company limited by shares (AG), but it isn't stock exchange listed so the accounting disclosure rules are negligiable. Unless they decide to list there is unlikely to be more information and the high tech market sector is dead.

German corporate taxes are painful so the tendancy is to minimise profites. When Germany's Neuer Markt was alive, companies could pay taxes according to their books filed under German law (HGB) but publish results according to IAS or US-GAAP. The tax man was held at bay by the agreements that supported disclosure in the Neuer Markt. Now there is no such segment and the tax man is very hungry - so any figures published will understate profits.

However, from the word going around, Suse aren't doing at all badly. They have always gone for a more corporate image which makes them appealing to big business. RH's hacker culture counts against them on this even though they have been very successfully climbing up market.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[hdparm]

What do yo mean???

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

"Because no one wants to do the shit work that you still need to do to make a system "Enterprise" ready. "

We haven't seen any major contribution except from people doing it for free. Yes, I know there are a couple of exceptions but they are rare.

"Yes they can, and they do. They have a QA department that runs QA testing on software which they subsequently ship. Just because its Open Source doesn't mean you can't QA test it."

Really? Seems to be kind of hard to be able to do that since it's a moving target. Maybe I was wrong on that one, sorry in that case.

"If its not a growth area, whats with the growth of Redhat? "

If you take a look at Redhats reports over the last year you will see that the greatest part (almost all even) of their revenue comes from selling per-seat licenses of their "Redhat Enterprise Linux AS/ES and WS". The same businessmodel as Microsoft, with the exception that Redhat don't pay the people actually making to software they sell.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[ThinWhiteDuke]

There are very, very few companies that contributed to Linux and open source in general as much as Red Hat did during last decade. In code, money, advocacy and jobs.

How much exactly did they contribute? AFAIK, RH does not have much more than a dozen full-time people working on GPLed Linux stuff. And this company generates $25m per quarter. This is insignificant.
You just don't want to face it: the world divides in 2 categories; those who develop free code and those who use it. The ones who make money are the 2nd category. RH just commits a symbolic amount of ressources back to the community; the most of their R&D is in proprietary stuff. There's nothing morally wrong with that. When people give away something, they shouldn't expect (or demand) anything back; otherwise it's not a gift.

The single company that makes the most value out of Linux is IBM. They have the optimal structure (IBM Global Services), brand and product portfolio for that job.

That's the great ambiguity about "making money out of OSS". You can only make money if you take significantly more than you give. Does anybody knows about a corp. making money when 75% of their engineers write GPL code full-time?

Re:Open Source is right!

[frp001]

I cannot talk about FreeBSD, my experience with Debian is that they are always a few steps behind for a matter of stability.
The "drivers" as you claim are kernel modules, and to my knowledge Redhat kernel sources are availble ( Redhat 8 and Redhat 9 ) you can also check in the update section.
So I would guess if you have trouble with Debian, either your kernel is not up to date (ftp.kernel.org) or the installation fails to detect and configure hardware correctly...
BTW I used a Dell box to try out Knoppix (which is Debian based) and have not met any problems.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[jsse]

Most open source hardcore zealots of just to blided by their MS-hatred to see clear.

I for one don't hate MS, I love their keyboards mouses and games; may be I'm not falling into your definition of 'hardcore' :)

Redhat does not have a huge development team, it's just a handfull of people customizing unpaid-for-software other had made.

You mean their Customer Development Team right? They're hardly 'handful', but I don't argue with you on that. Have you really look at what Redhat is offering? You need more than a 'handful' of development teams to maintain their Redhat Enterprise and Advanced Server version. Not to mention their own redhat-* packages and many other GUI wrapper of free software.

The great majority of open source development is unpaid labour.

Is that still considered 'labour' if we like to do that? :) Besides, we got jobs because we're packages mainteners.

I believe it's you who need to pop your head out of the soil and face the reality.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Redhat

RHL Announcement?

[twener]

I'm still waiting for the renewal of RedHat's RHL announcement or whatever it will be called. Its page still only states:

Red Hat wants to thank the community for embracing this new project. We have received a lot of interest, comments, and questions, which have resulted in us rethinking some of our initial plans.

Some things we are working on before we relaunch are:

• Collaborating with existing projects to avoid duplication of effort
• Incorporating community suggestions and feedback

Re:RHL Announcement?

[jensend]

The project is on hold, largely because a lot of clueless lusers thought the shift was a perfect opportunity to flood redhat's development mailing lists and ask stupid questions. Redhat is going to wait until after their next release to try again.

I think this is one of the main problems large projects have right now. Mozilla's bugzilla, the OpenOffice.org mailing lists, and many of the other primary communication means of large projects are being flooded with people who aren't developing for the project and don't know what they're talking about. The projects don't want to move to a model where only those made members by a list/bugzilla administrator can post, because that would really discourage new developers. So the signal-to-noise ratio just gets worse and worse.

Re:RHL Announcement?

[Anonymous Coward]

how do u make linuX werk b/c I just download it an I can't get this 'iso' thingy to open. lol. help me!!!!!111~ lol lol
a/s/l?

Re:RHL Announcement?

[MSG]

Redhat is going to wait until after their next release to try again.

Anything to back that up? From all that I've heard, they're still planning on deploying this release of Red Hat Linux as a community project.

Re:RHL Announcement?

[jensend]

Havoc Pennington says that Cambridge (Red Hat X) will be released before Redhat works to get the "infrastructure" set up to handle the flood and will start incorporating outside contributions for the release after that. I've heard this other places as well, though I don't remember where (I don't keep a bibliography for my brain).

Maybe its the way they work

[fox2mike]

Well to make such an amzing progress takes effort. And they pay their programmers pretty well too ! Most of them have the luxuries of a nice car & home.

They deserve to be where they are right now, the system they have adopted (which has both programmers & volunteers working on RHL) seems to be working really well. That leaves us wondering why haven't the others followed a similar approach & if they did, have they been as successful as RedHat ?

Change name

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean they'll call themselves "Black Hat" from now on?

Re:Maybe RedHat can teach Mandrake

[jgisclon]

Two totally different products. Red Hat's cash cow is selling support to enterprises that use RH mostly on servers.

Mandrake is an end-user desktop distro, primarily. Selling support is not going to be a viable model for them, and with ubiquitous broadband and CD burners, selling boxed CD sets is a tough route to go as long as they make a free-as-in-beer distro.

Given their position, I think the careware "Mandrake Club" is about the only thing that will work for them unless they decide to follow SuSE and cease to make free isos available and rely soley on retail CD sales.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[NickFortune]

So what are you saying?

That RedHat are a bad company?

That open source is not working?

That IBM are a bad company?

That there's no money in open source anything?

You seem to have a point you very much want to make, but I'm not at all clear on what it might be.

Oh Come on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is not going to change the world, neither is MacOS. Microsoft is far to big to ever vanish regardless of whether you or I want them to. If Microsoft ever crumbled a la Enron (which seems rather unlikely), their assets would be some neoMicrosoft.

Somebody does well with linux and suddenly selling software is dead? I think, at the end of the day, some people would like to make money off their hard work.Saying Linux/open source ever emerge out of it's niche market is like saying we will all be communists. Sure it's a nice idea, but not everyone thinks that way, furthermore look at all the failed communist nations.

I know, -1 Troll (thank you linux zealots God forbid anyone speak ill of your precious linux)

Re:Oh Come on!

[rillopy]

Microsoft will not last forever. The Roman empire was far larger and monopolaic, yet it crumbled.

Re:Open Source Pie

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah maybe...
But what I'm not sure about your Kudos is while RedHat is doing good how many others can play the same in the same boat.

And what is that comment supposed to mean? How many successfull Operating System producers do you see in the commercial world?

Considering that Red Hat is doing well with Linux's current marketsize and competition over services from every size of company ranging from IBM to independent software engineers show that there is space to grow.

Wether most of that growth will benefit Red Hat or up and comming competitors is a different question, but the market for Linux distributions/services is definitelly growing.

SEC filing

[glassesmonkey]

• SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
  
  • FORM 8-K
    
  CURRENT REPORT
  PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF
  THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934
  
  • Date of Report : September 18, 2003
  • 
    Red Hat, Inc.
    
  
  
• Sales to approximately 26,000 subscriptions
  
• ???
• Gross margins increased to 74% (profit)
  

Re:Maybe RedHat can teach Mandrake

[Anonymous Coward]

Its exactly this kind of short sighted thinking that dooms many in the linux world. Mandrake has created a distro that is very easy to install and admin. You claim therefore they are an end user distro. How does that follow?

Mandrake should be doing EXACTLY what redhat has dont, leverage their ease of use, to people interested in setting up linux SERVERS. Look at how many people choose windows solutions PRIMARILY DO TO THEIR EASE OF USE! This would be an EXCELLENT selling point for manrake to BUSINESS customers.

I personally prefer openbsd and solaris to linux on servers. I really don't care much for linux. I do think however that Mandrake's product is cleaner and easier to use for most any company than RedHat is. The problem with Mandrake is they have a great engineering crew, but NO business model to speak of, and no marketing team to speak of either.

dividends

[kevin lyda]

they're not there yet, but it would be nice if they get to the point where they can give back dividends. a tech company giving out dividends. that would be another way for them to stand out.

Re:dividends

[Mike Hawk]

Check. They should stand out how?

Re:dividends

[Anonymous Coward]

How about that N-Gage??? Have you seen Tony Hawk Pro Skater on it? It's got the best graphics ever!!

Hey you fucking dickless ass-goblin, why don't you stop playing Rescue Rangers on the NES with your retarded cousin? I mean, I realize you're using it as a ploy to get him naked, but just cut it out. Go to a gay bar and be a normal faggot - not the fucked up one you have been.

Hey Mikey, when does the N-Gage come out and have you pre-ordered yours?

No!

[Second Vampyre]

Step three is to set up a paypal account and start begging.
Get with the program.

Re:No!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Step three is to set up a paypal account and start begging.

Heh!

Re:No!

[Second Vampyre]

Won't somebody think of the poor starving developers?

Microsoft earns that in 7 hours

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes Microsoft about 7.6 hours to earn 28 million in revenue. Not 7 days; 7 hours.

Kinda small but hey...

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, dunno about you, but those numbers seem teensy in the enterprise software space. 12million a year isn't a lot of money (note we're talking revenue here - not profit). But kudos to them for generating any revenue at all.

SCO did RH a big favor...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think SCO's blathering would have damaged them, but they're actually up the last couple of quarters after posting some net losses in previous quarters." Kudos to Red Hat. They must be doing something right.

SCO might just have done everyone a favor. All the fuss = free publicity, after people realize that SCO's words are all hubris, they're left with the knowledge of a free, stable operating system.

Why the bigger numbers?

[Pros_n_Cons]

Some things I'm about to say might be alittle harsh but Slashdot needs to take its medicine.
First does anyone remember when Redhat9 came out, a huge selling point for them was that you could beat the rush and get RH 9 a week early if you signed up for support? An aweful lot of people signed up for that (including myself) . so many infact it ended up killing thier servers speed to something around 5k. But guess what. Slashdot posted bit torrent within the first hour happy to offer non paying customers a better solution. So how many people will be buying support this time around do you think? Not as many I'll bet.

If Slashdot is always talking about morals and doing whats right with everything from patents to software. Why can't they allow a company that has argueably did more or atleast as much for linux then any other single company to earn a buck for just one week? Thats all folks. It's time we start showing as a community that we're not just a bunch of freeloaders, anarchists & hypocrites.

Re:Why the bigger numbers?

[SlashDread]

"freeloaders, anarchists & hypocrites."

- Every person on the world likes the concept of gratis, why should "the community" (I dont like labeling, but..) be different.
- Anarchism is a political view. It can be reasoned its the utmost freedom political view. It is however not something "bad"(C)
- ALL of humankind are hypocrits.

Its time people understand this "community" is NO DIFFERENT then others.

Greetz /Dread

(C)G. "dubya" Bush.

Re:Why the bigger numbers?

[glwtta]

Thats all folks. It's time we start showing as a community that we're not just a bunch of freeloaders, anarchists & hypocrites.

Future versions of RedHat Linux are expressly "community oriented" - they don't really expect to make any money off of it (nor should they).

Their "Enterprise Linux" line (ES AS and WS) is where they'll be getting the cash from. The best way to support them is to make sure your company (and many a slashdotter is in a position to directly influence this) coughs up the (measly) $1,800 for the licenses, rather than installing the latest bittorrented ISO on their servers.

Re:Why the bigger numbers?

[silverbax]

"Its time people understand this "community" is NO DIFFERENT then others."

Let's see:

Slashdot: favors open source
Most communites: do not even know what open source means, nor why it should matter.

Slashdot: favors Linux
Most communities: favors email and AIM on Windows

Slashdot: opposes the RIAA
Most communities: love that Brittany Spears!

Yeah, you've got your finger on the pulse there. Slashdot's got the same percentage of political views as every other community. That's why there are so many Slashdot clones out there fighting for our visits.

Re:Why the bigger numbers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat should help make a modified BitTorrent that only allowed authenticated users to join the torrent. Then they can offer early release of their ISO and charge money for it... they can seed the torrent with their hefty servers, and everyone can download it and get great speeds.

It is the whole point of BitTorrent, so that companies like Redhat don't have to mirror a file, and the end users have to hunt and peck for a mirror that isn't overloaded.

I, like many others, are tired of the old mirror-based wait-in-line download systems. Put those powerful servers behind seeding and torrent of your big file, and everyone benefits! Until then, expect sites like Slashdot to offer a better service for free.

Re:Why the bigger numbers?

[QuantumRiff]

I pay for an up2date account for 2 servers here at work. That entitles me to the preferred service, and earlier ISO downloads. Problem was, I was getting 8k/s from redhat, and found that the Bittorrent was getting me about 130k/s. For the small updates its great, It has saved us a few times to instantly get in and not have to wait cause the paying users get in first. for $50 a year, it was a bargain. Redhat usually has enough bandwidth for its customers, but when something huge comes out, its just easier to use bittorrent.

For those of you who use Redhat at work, remember, you pay $50 dollars for one entitlement account, and you get a second one free. so $50 for two servers, or $100 for 3, etc.. for a year. and you don't have to have the newest distro to update. The demo versions of up2date I believe only works if your version is 1 year old or less.. I'm getting lots of updates for RH 7.2 and 7.3..

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[ThinWhiteDuke]

That RedHat are a bad company? That IBM are a bad company?
No. Neither Red Hat nor IBM are bad companies; they don't steal anything.

That open source is not working? That there's no money in open source anything?
Somehow. My point is that people should not expect making money if they mainly give away what they produce. Open source *does* work in the sense that it produces good software. It doesn't work to bring revenues to an open source developper.
IMHO, the economics of open source work as follows. Some people develop free software. They get a lot out of that (knowledge, skills, contacts with other bright people, self-fulfilment...); but no money. Others take OSS, brand it, package it with some proprietary stuff and sell it, thus making money. I'm fine with this. It's a fair deal if everybody is clear about his objectives.

What bugs me is when people describe Red Hat as a company producing open source code. They aren't. Or they aren't primarily that. They're primarily a packaging and service company, run by marketers. Open source code is their raw material, they don't produce it.

Re:They must be doing something right?

[Anonymous Coward]

first off market price noes not equal fair price.

Many MANY programmers are greedy idiots and price their software way too damn high. Espically whne they are copying a freely available program.

Nope, finding the free stuff is #1 priority. Only as a last resort is anyone at my company to actually buy software.

Free first, then buy.. but only the product that has the best Cost->useability margin.

Examples??? Orcad is insanely priced at around $3700.00 for one station. while Eagle CAD is priced at $99.00 for one station.

Both are Electronic Circuit and board design packages. BOTH get the job done just as well. BUT, my employees can take the free version of eagle cad home legally....

Who do we support? Eagle CAD, a company not gouging it's customers by overcharging for their product.... OrCad will never ever be used here because of the insane prices they chose.

So yes, if your piece of crap app is overpriced I will not buy it, but will instead buy sonething as good or better for less. and then warn others away from you.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

How much exactly did they contribute? AFAIK, RH does not have much more than a dozen full-time people working on GPLed Linux stuff. And this company generates $25m per quarter. This is insignificant.

You don't get it. With OSS individual entities need to expend less effort to get things done because of reuse.

Assuming you are right they employ 12 fulltime developers writing code that's contributed to the pool of publically available software.
That's roughly 1 developer per $8M in yearly revenues.
Let's assume the total yearly revenue is $5B for OSS related businesses/activities (I'm pulling this number out of my ass, but according to this IBM alone raked in a billion last year.) and extrapolate the 1 developer/ $8M in yearly revenues.
That's 625 full-time developers working on Linux/OSS, 625 man years worth of code that is out there for anyone. Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that, although OSS is more like standing on the shoulders of millions of midgets, now that I think about it.

Insignificant indeed...

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[10Ghz]

RH just commits a symbolic amount of ressources back to the community; the most of their R&D is in proprietary stuff.

Could you name some of this "proprietary stuff" RH is developing? No? that's what I thought....

Re:Open Source is right!

[Pros_n_Cons]

But we have to remember about the roots - RedHat is becoming a little bit prioprietary, a little bit uncompatible... yes! yes!

No, Why don't you read RH's patent policy first HERE

basically they're defensive patents, I wont say anything more cause you should read it yourself and become englightened.

SLAVE TRADING?

[Stu Charlton]

I would like to honestly point out something that seems to be often missed by free software advocates and is a major reason why the free software argument has had a difficult time politically.

You have an opinion about what software becomes when it leaves your head - that the information is "freed". The world at large has a very different perspsective on that, they view it as intellectual property.

Who is "right" or "wrong" objectively is for philosophers or saints to decide. In politics, the question is never, "who is right", the question is one of "what works" to progress society? (the reason for this is that politics, even democratic politics, is not a realiable means to figure out right from wrong)

I am saying this because rhetoric like the above message is clearly philosophical, it is not political. Using a philosophical stance will not help the cause of promoting free software and reasonable copyright laws in this world, because philosophical posturing is often not concerned with reality as it is, but how it should be (or how the FSF says it should be).

The idea of copyright as a means to promote the progress of society is an old one, and still may be a good one. But it continues to be stretched to the point of abuse by those who wish to turn this principle into solely implying the progress of for-profit corporations. We must fight this trend politically. That means, we need solutions, and we need actions, and concrete visions.

We do not need philosophizing about whether charging a fee for free software is good or bad, or rationalizing it as "giving a small free to other friends". I point out this not as an insult, but because you seemed to have hit RMS' philosophy square on the head. It is a crystal clear example of why RMS is ineffective in politics but ESR is somewhat effective. (I sometimes wonder if the FSF goal is free software or universal friendship?)

I think most people realize that economic transactions in the world exist precicely because most of the world is not friendly with one another. We may regret this, think it awful, but it is ... reality today. Software development exists within an economic system. And changing that is a a much bigger battle than fair copyright laws. Choose your battles wisely, and some may actually be solved in this lifetime.

Re:SLAVE TRADING?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can a movement really have purpose without a philosophy?

Can a movement ever be successful if it does not strive to make the philosophy become reality?

Re:SLAVE TRADING?

[Stu Charlton]

I didn't say philosophy was wrong or bad, I just said that philosophical posturing is politically ineffective.

Philosophical inquiry is a noble and good persuit. But when it becomes mere posturing it elminates the possibility of debate which is the essense of politics.

Re:SLAVE TRADING?

[XNormal]

In politics, the question is never, "who is right", the question is one of "what works" to progress society?

"What works" is a great question to ask. Much more productive than asking "what's right".

Ummm.... but exactly what does it have to do with today's politics?

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[arkanes]

You can only make money if you take significantly more than you give.

You know this is the basis of making money in any industry, right? Buy low, sell high. Etc.

I think it's pretty obvious that any company that spent more than it's revenue on supporting Linux isn't going to be profitable (duh).

Anyone have stats on sales vs. service?

[192939495969798999]

I'd be fascinated to see how much of RedHat's revenue really comes from the service sign-ups, and how much from OS /product sales. Everyone says that their service is the money-maker, but I want to see for myself what the breakdown is.

Real numbers or Enron-style accounting?

[SgtChaireBourne]

Here you can see that MS-Window and MS-Office pull in monopoly rents. i.e. 4-5 times the free market price. With everything else losing money, any price cuts in those two are going to cut deeply. Thus the panic to spread expensive lock-in techologies (e.g. Palladium/ WMP9) and licenses (License 6).

Given that software distribution can have nearly zero cost, RedHat, SuSe, Apple and others seem to have more viable model. Even the RIAA could learn from them, though for both Microsoft and RIAA, I think they've waited too long and would do the U.S. economy the best by leaving the playingfield altogether.

Re:Real numbers or Enron-style accounting?

[adamy]

Yeahm the RIAAA should give away the music and then just sell support.

Er, Umm, Hmmmmmmm

Re:Real numbers or Enron-style accounting?

[Flower]

They keep churning out those crappy DRM "cds" and they probably could.

Re:Real numbers or Enron-style accounting?

[rollingcalf]

They should give away the recorded music and sell concert tickets.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Seems to be kind of hard to be able to do that since it's a moving target.

You simply select a single version of the software and QA against that version. This is how it works in traditional development shops, too. RAD projects can turn out three or four releases a week, and that can and is QA tested.

Now, Redhat may be making money selling per-seat licences, but the core technology they are basing that licence revenue on is Open Source. There is nothing stopping those Enterprise lincencees from patching and recompiling their own kernel, for example. Which is exactly what Open Source is all about, in essence.

Re:Maybe RedHat can teach Mandrake

[Chemicalscum]

Mandrake is also a damn good server distro. Mandrake has two problems. (1) a former management financially wrecking the company in the dot.bomb era and (2) The French government not giving it more support by pushing is use in government agencies.

Mandrake could really become a significant force in the enterprise server area in Europe if the French government gave the same sort of push for its internal use as the Chinese government gives Red Flag Linux. Or for that matter as much as the German Governments at the federal, provincial and municipal level give SuSe.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[digitect]

Is the source code for Red Hat's installers available? How about their build and dependency system/database?

(Not trying to flame, just curious myself--I'm a long time Red Hat user but I've never seen mention of where to go to find either these. And both seem to be quite significant differentiating features of their distribution.)

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Dr_Claw]

Is the source code for Red Hat's installers available?

Their installer is called anaconda and like all other packages in the distribution a source RPM is available (eg: pub/redhat/linux/9/en/os/i386/SRPMS/ of your local redhat ftp mirror).

How about their build and dependency system/database?

Not sure what you mean here. If you mean the scripts they have to build the binary files they distribute, I don't think so. However, they will all be using Free tools. It's definitely feasible to create your own version of RedHat (if kickstart is not what you want to do). They even split the copyrighted images/text with trademarks out into files you can easily replace.

Dependency system - again, not sure what you mean unless you're referring to RPM which is absolutely Free (and used by many other people).

It's worth pointing out that they are trying to open up their development process to the community. This will be a slow process but they are definitely trying to do the right thing.

MS Profit

[LowellPorter]

Revenue for the quarter was $28 million, with net income at $3 million.

Considering during that same time, Microsoft made over a billion in profit. This doesn't look like much of a success.

OTOH, way to go Red Hat, keep it up. Only $997,000,000 to catch up to Microsoft!

Re:MS Profit

[code_echelon]

"Considering during that same time, Microsoft made over a billion in profit. This doesn't look like much of a success."

Microsoft is a huge monopoly, Redhat cannot be expected to compete with this(not likely ever but maybe one day). Its gonna take many other computer companies to take Microsoft out of the market and a large turn in the OS market. This has definately started to happen in the buisness world as the cost of running a full company using Microsoft products is getting to be too expensive especially when there a Linux distros that can do almost everything virtually the same, are more stable and that are free. Microsoft like many other companies in the past are going to have to adapt to survive and so far they don't seem to be doing a good job. Like a child they seem to have gotten scared and are attacking many of there adversies only creating more enemies. I haven't seen a company that is hated as much as Microsoft is in a long time(other than WorldCom and Enron).

Second profitable quarter... without handouts

[Sri Lumpa]

And contrary to some beggars that can't seems to make money without threatening lawsuit or getting handouts from Microsoft and Sun this is their second profitable quarter based purely on the quality of their product and the soundness of their business model.

Go, Redhat, go!

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Dr_Claw]

How much exactly did they contribute?

In direct funds to other projects, I've no idea. They have given money to various projects though.

AFAIK, RH does not have much more than a dozen full-time people working on GPLed Linux stuff.

Well I can definitely think of around that many offhand. They're all pretty high profile too. Alan Cox (nuf said), Havoc Pennington (GNOME, freedesktop.org), Ingo Molnar (responsible for the new sceduler and pre-emptive kernel work), Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla), Jeff Law (GCC), Dave Jones (more kernel stuff), Rik van Riel (kernel VM work). All these people are high respected and have done a huge amount of good for OSS. I stopped there because I need to go and get some lunch, but I could have gone on. These are just names people on Slashdot will recognise immediately. There are many developers RedHat employ who work on embedded stuff, internationalisation work, etc, etc. Check out some of their mailing lists.

RedHat have also contributed by doing stuff like this. OK, that's their own PR, but google and you can find other stuff (help at LUGs, etc). They've helped out with legal stuff on some projects. They've defended Linux's name (hello SCO).

RH just commits a symbolic amount of ressources back to the community;

Rubbish. See the stuff above. They are a significant factor in pushing Linux forward. They continually suprise me (them being commercial does sometimes make me sceptical!) in the stuff they do solely for the community. I actually think that most of it ends up helping them out (even if it's just because people think better of them and so help them out in return). They continue to try and open their processes to the community (see their plans for the base distro.

the most of their R&D is in proprietary stuff.

Care to back up that statement?

The single company that makes the most value out of Linux is IBM.

Here I could possibly agree with you. IBM probably do have more people developing Linux related products or software (I know one of them too). I bet you more of those are proprietary than RedHat's though (as a proportion). No doubt IBM have done a great deal for Linux - but so have RedHat. Who's been the most important? I honestly couldn't say. Could Linux go on without either or both of them? Yes. Would it have acheived the same succes without either or both? Yes.

A final point I would like to make is that one thing RedHat have done very successfully (which is why they're now publishing these profits) is they've got the name and value of Linux out there. For this alone, we should appreciate them.

false

[Ender Ryan]

You are completely wrong, and I cannot believe this got modded up. Are you trolling? WTF?

Anyway, RedHat has had Alan Cox on staff for a while now. I'm sure they pay him well. And he does a lot of general kernel development/maintenance, not just RH specific stuff.

And he's not the only one. RH generally ships with kernels tailored with their own improvements, which are all released under the GPL.

RH created RPM, which is GPLed. They created a number of other tools for their distro that are ALL GPLed. A number of other Linux distros were originally based on RH Linux, which wouldn't have been possible if their distro was not almost 100% GPLed.

RH has contributed tons of GPLed code. A number of current OS projects started at RH. BTW, what "proprietary stuff" are you talking about?

Now IBM. IBM has contributed something like 10^6 lines of code to the kernel. And as someone else mentioned, a bunch of Java programming tools and other stuff, all released under the GPL.

You know, really, many of the "movers and shakers" in the OSS world these days are employed by companies like RH and IBM.

Or loss

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite liturgy to the opposite, Microsoft does not always turn a profit. Some times a profit turns out to be an $18 billion loss when real math is used. Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and others looked great on the books until they got audited.

Even if there is any money, fines for failed security, false advertising, and anti-trust problems could slap that last dot-com MLM spinning further into the red.

So, RedHat could actually be ahead.

Even the big server stuff is available...

[hughk]

I agree and will add to what you say, if RedHat develop something, the rest of the community gets it through the GPL (and the fixes too). What they eat their lunch from are the business customers who want enterprise support. RedHat does bundle some third party tools with their high end server packages and these may be non-GPL. But RH seem to be ok though.

Sure, everyone has the source code and can give the support but most businesses prefer to go back to the vendor.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[hughk]

RedHat doesn't produce much that is GPLed. However you see a *lot* of stuff which was written by people either employed by or are under contract to RedHat. RedHat the company, markets and supports the code, which they pay people to develop.

Cashing out

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting link ... Microsoft spends more on Marketing and Advertising than it does Research and Developement.

In simulations, that is one of the things to do when you need to cash out at the busingess' end-of-life.

new era

[Anonymous Coward]

How will the change in philosphy towards consumer releases effect their bottom line? This remains to be seen

I was on the call -- Notes and thoughts

[pauly_thumbs]

I called into this and here are my thoughts and Notes --

In summation: they are growing at about 10% although operating costs are up a little. .

From what I heard they are moving to a sales model more like Microsoft's relying more on VAR's than direct selling. Their Enterprise subscriptions seems to be moving well -- mostly driven by VAR's and OEM's and this is the driving foce in RH money today!

Kernel modifications to be released in 2004 will make Linux more accessible to Large Databases -- (where was this in 2001???)

They are branching out successfully in N Europe and Asia

Messy but thorough Notes:

2nd quarter 2004 conference Gabriel Zulik --

Matt SZulik , Kevin Thompson, Tim Buckley, -- press release after market close today -- disclaimer --

Matt Zsulik -- good news - strongest quarter ever revenue 28.8 mil 36% up 10 mil in positive growth -- Global enterprise marketplace -- replacing proprietary UNIX's for Linux -- migrating from client server to internet distributed computing -- Linux pilots -- enterprise Linux 26k in q2 -- increased international investment -- Japan Korea and northern Europe -- pacific rim partnerships -- 3rd party apps RH certification -- network appliance and people soft certified -- BEA will be in also -- embedded RH offering for hardware tools telecom positive for embedded -- Certification RHCE's 10k -- mgmt John Young from HP as VP of marketing -- Large DB's will be accessible with Kernel configs -- more enterprise ready? A shortcoming previously

Kevin Thompson -- milestones -- 1) operating profit of 240k -- operating loss of 1.1 mil in q1 -- 2) Linux enterprise subscriptions 26k up 10% 585$ each sub up 3% 3) revenue is up 200% 4) subscription renewals up 90% 4) revenue in general is up 20% 5) 3.3 mil up 120% in net income.18.5 mil in subscriptions -- mostly in enterprise 10.3 mil in services -- mostly in enterprise a little in embedded Q2 strong growth increased by enterprise subscriptions Renewal rate is healty at 90% for enterprise subscriptions -- large customers with direct relationship it will be a year before they realize true rates. Over 25% represent migration from another system to RH -- commitments to migrations of enterprise from other RH users. Retail is at 3.1 million -- Rh Linux 9 Enterprise from 2mil to 9 mil -- 13% growth over 1 year -- OEM helped with consulting and learning services business. Embedded 1.7 mil in revenues -- mostly driven by services. International revenue is up mostly from Japan and N Euro. -- korean market Tim Buckley will address More talk about enterprise subscriptions driving up margins Operating expenses are up -- raises -- commisions and office space in Korea and legal costs. 3.1 mil profit -- currency gains -- because of US dollar vs YEN and Euro. 307mil in liquidity balance -- no long term debt. Said they were confident in growth because of enterprise subscription -- projection for q3 31 - 36 8 - 10 % growth overall. Enterprise projected up 12% in q3. Retail strategy will be more supportive of enterprise (going away (?)) Operaing expenses will go up significantly -- 2.9 for full net income or .02 a share. Subscription volumes projected to increase

Tim Buckley -- enterprise -- partner and channel -- enterprise best bookings ever -- upgrading to enterprise solution multi year -- federal sector and DoD increase significatn contract -- new biz in other agancies -- sales support and consultin -- finaclail sector - new customers - multi year contracts - broad based addoption strategic ini finacila retail manu - semi c telco entertainment -- applicarin vendors like ppl soft proting to klinus -- new pipeline growth -- market broadening. Re-sellers and partners -- extended with IBM x series -- preinstaled and preconfiguired -- higest volume offering -- HP and IBM -- expanding channel -- assist in selling process -- Oracle and BeA promoting RH increase in sales bc of their influence -- sellingmodel from direct to indirect -- repsellers are d

It's the distro I'll drop

[Yue]

Hey, Redhat, don't be too happy about makink money now.

Once 2004 will be here, updates to RH7.3 will be discontinued and redhat computers will be hacked as crazy. There is no other alternative than moving away. No "supported in 2004" version of Redhat is by far near the maturity flexibility and completness of 7.3, so there is no much of a choice in the Redhat world.

Go Redhat 2003, go SuSE 2004+.

Re:It's the distro I'll drop

[aldoman]

Upgrade too 9.0. You can't blame RH for stopping support of old OSes. I agree the cycle is too short, but Linux moves *very* fast.

Re:It's the distro I'll drop

[melonman]

Upgrade to 9.0

I did that, and the result is that half my applications don't run anymore unless I set the session language to American (even Perl seg faults, which is quite an achievement), and my server kernel panics every x times I try to mount a floppy disc. I think the latter problem is a dual processor kernel problem, but the point is that if I was running a mission-critical server rather than a cybercafe I would be reinstalling RH7, and if that wasn't supported I would be looking for another distro.

Re:It's the distro I'll drop

[Erwos]

If you need support, buy AS or AW distros - those are supported for 5 years. If you want to cheap out, compile them yourself from the sources that RedHat so nicely provides. Do you think SuSE is planning to support you for free forever? I think not.

Just because it's Linux doesn't mean it breaks life's most consistent rule: you don't get something for nothing.

-Erwos

Re:It's the distro I'll drop

[code_echelon]

If you need support for that long you need to move to another distribution. Redhat can't be expected to support there old OS for life especially when most of the people using it are using it at no charge. You can still update your programs by compiling the source. Anyways you can always upgrade to one of the newer versions, I suggest 9 over 8, and you will be supported with that. As for your applications not working I have upgraded from Redhat 7.3 too 9 and have been able to get all my applications working including Perl and Apache etc. I agree with you about SuSE though I believe Redhat has gotten where it is due to its marketing strategies and by getting its name out in the industry. I think in 2004 some of the lesser known Linux distros like Slackware, SuSE and Gentoo might pick up some speed.

Stock up

[hey]

up 9 percent
Not much of a surprise, I guess.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[fr2asbury]

Perhaps my knowledge of RedHat history is flawed, but I seem to remember reading that it did infact fork off from Slackware. I'm not saying that's bad, just that RedHat didn't spring up out of a vacuum. Maybe you don't count that as a "straight fork" like perhaps early Mandrake which was RedHat with KDE.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Valar]

And how many full time employees do *you* have working on GPL stuff? Or, to be more fair, how about the company you work for? Now, I dislike the freeloaders as much as anyone but a) they are allowed by law to freeload if they want :) b) they aren't. I mean, are you arguing that they should hire programmers until they reach $0 profit? I say, 12 programmers working on open source for the forseeable future is better than 500 working on open source for the next quarter, until the investors pull out and the company collaspses.

What's Great about America

[glenrm]

RHAT IPO'ed. RHAT is profitable. Is this a sign that the American system allows for competion even against a company with over $30 billion in the bank? Yes. So drop the monopoly / too much power non-sense and get back into the ring or in front of the compilier.

Re:What's terrifying - KARMA WHORE!

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that a reply to the previous comment? You quoted the original article and did not reply to any of the statements made in the comment to which you are "replying".

Oh... I see... You "replied" to the only comment that is currently moderated at +5, so you hope that your statements will be more visible there, and hopefully moderated up.

How is this called again? Karma whore!

Revenue from Linux

[mic256]

You are comparing companies (Microsoft vs RedHat), but let's compare products (Linux vs Windows) This is from news.com (see bottom of page)
$2.05 billion: Total revenue from sales of Linux servers in 2002, up 63 percent from 2001. (IDC) Which is only 1/4th of total Microsoft revenue.
What is the revenue from, say, Windows Servers ?

Re:Revenue from Linux

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Does that $2.05 Billion figure include the server _hardware_? Just askin', ya know.

Personally, I'm glad Red Hat is doing well. It means Linux is maturing. It means that more businesses will look for a Linux solution. As a unix software developer, that makes me happy.

A service, packaged as a product

[Jungle guy]

Red Hat says they are a service company, but their cap improved after they developed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In fact, it is a service: Red Hat downloads a bunch of free software avaliable on the internet, packages it and works hard to make it a stable platform for enterprises, backporting bugfixes for it for years (free software developers tend to make bugfixes only for their latest software, but you can't be on the bleeding edge because dependencies may break other applications, specially closed source ones, like the Oracle database).

They sell it for a thousand dollars or more, saying they are only charging for 24/7 support. But whoever runs Red Hat Enterprise knows that it is a very stable software, and, once you have set it up, requires only small atention. So, in fact, it works like a product.

Purchasing services might be good if you have on special neeed, but 90% of IT needs can be supplied by off-the-shelf software, that should require little baby feeding. The whole Linux mantra "you get the software for free and pay only for support" is not endorsed by many companies - they don't want to have a source of impredictability on their budgets. Red Hat has learned this, adapted itself and is making a living, paying for a lot of free software developers. If you tune free software, purge the bugs and sell it, you have gains of scale that could not be possible on a traditional service model.

Buying Red Hat Linux is great for a company because, even after they stop supporting it, you can hire someone to backport bugfixes and support it - you get the freaking source code of it.

Re:A service, packaged as a product

[HiThere]

Could *you* package a product stable enough to support an enterprise?

The only way I could do so would be by using Debian stable. And the Red Hat Enterprise version is much friendlier (especially during the setup). Also the Red Hat edition has support for multiple raid partitions at various raid levels, and various other features that are more than a bit difficult to configure when starting from a vanilla Debian. (Mind you, I think the pricing is rediculous, but if that's what it takes to convince people...)

Re:A service, packaged as a product

[Tony-A]

A few quibbles, (and I'm not at all sure which bodily orifice I'm speaking out of).

Is a packaged service a package or a service? Methinks it depends on how you want to view it. I suspect large companies view it as a product and the community views it as a service. Product because there is some identifiable token that carries a price, similar to a room key in a hotel.

free software developers tend to make bugfixes only for their latest software It's free on the bleeding edge (discounting the cost of blood;). Large enterprises will want it to be somebody else's blook and will be willing to pay for the privilege.

But whoever runs Red Hat Enterprise knows that it is a very stable software, and, once you have set it up, requires only small atention. This is not a safe bet. Red Hat will do everything they can to make it as stable as possible, however, at an enterprise scale there will be certain areas where it pays heavily to be much more aggresive than on a lesser scale. Also some problems will only show up under heavy load. Paying for support after you find out you need it seems a bit suicidal. Far better to buy the insurance (by whatever name it is called) so that the necessary machinery is in place before you need it. Even better if the "free-loaders" are the ones on the bleeding edge and they run into and fix the problems before the companies do. It's a strange ecology. Corporations pay big bucks for obsolete software which eventually comes from unpaid beta-testers. If you define symbiosis as mutual parasitism, methinks there are interesting possibilities wherein everybody gains, gains a lot.

Re:A service, packaged as a product

[Jungle guy]

Red Hat is as "outdated" as Debian stable (it is based on Red Hat 7.x). And that is good - it is much more stable than Red Hat 9.

Re:A service, packaged as a product

[Jungle guy]

I am not saying that Red Hat Enterprise is perfect, but is a software that has not so much bugs as vanilla Red Hat (think Debian stable). The chances of finding a bug there are not very big, and, when they patch it, it doesn't breaks everything, liker some Windows hotfixes. Companies pay big bucks for it for the support, but is almost to give peace of mind to them, and they should call the support line, say, once or twice a year. And Red Hat can say that they give 24/7 support because the software is stable and tested by the community, so they are not getting many calls.

So, let's think: Red Hat packages a software that was tested by the community and sell it for enterprises for big bucks. They say they only charge for support, but, as we have used this software for years and contributed to their Bugzilla, they don't need to give a lot of for their costummers. They are selling a product, even if they say it is a service.

A very interesting business model, and the ecosystem analogy you used, of home users getting free (as in beer) software and being unpaid beta-testers for a software sold for big corporations, is excelent. I can only say that I support it 100%!

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[boudie]

When last heard from, Alan Cox was going back to school to get an MBA and was babbling incoherently in Welsh (eeh ekky thump).

the best part of the call

[pauly_thumbs]

Was at the end Szulik was congratulating his team -- i guess he thought the phone was on mute and he said to something to the effect:

"That was great you were fabulous -- If you were a woman I'd kiss you"

then the questions began.

1st questions

"Hi Matt who were you going to kiss there?"

-- No response

you can't make this stuff up folks

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[boudie]

Yes IBM has released a lot of code into the Linux kernel - ask SCO's lawyers. Has anyone considered that instead of SCO and MS conspiring to off Linux, it's actually SCO, Microsoft and IBM.

Mod parent DOWN, incorrect

[Medievalist]

sure, they haven't directly contributed much in the way of new code

Are you trolling or incredibly uninformed?

Last I checked, Alan Cox, Havoc Pennington and Erik Troan are all Red Hat coders...

There was no V5.6...

[Anonymous Coward]

...as far as I know. I seem to remember 5.3 was the rawhide that evolved into 6.0?

Its the other way around

[JohnwheeleR]

They must be doing something right.

Microsoft is doing something wrong. Companies are turning to Linux. Most would agree its takes a good sys admin to provide availability and security. Linux will have its day in the sun. Someone will get greedy and the chinese will start writing worms.

Broke even

[Anonymous Coward]

You people forgot that RedHat sits on $300 million and that money generates about $3 million per quarter in interest income.

So RedHat basically just broke even.

I will always love you

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I will.

Re:I will always love you

[Anonymous Coward]

i hate you!

iTunes and Red Hat

[cubicledrone]

This concludes the argument over whether people will pay for something they can get on-line for free.

Thank you.

The PROBLEM with Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used RHL since version 3. I've been paying for it since version 5.0, and my employer currently has a 200-system enterprise license.

Red Hat is mostly excellent. Up2date is a good tool, and the patches are timely for security problems.

Mostly.

Patches for bugs without profound security implications seem to always get assigned to one person - Nalin D. This person is clearly overworked to an astounding degree, and consequently there are bugs that simply do not get addressed properly. Often a fix exists in bugzilla for a year without making it into the up2date system!

Take for example, the authconfig bugs (still outstanding) and the pppd bug (took a year to reach customers). These are typical.

Red Hat needs to unload some stuff from Nalin, and/or assign someone to make sure bugfixes that are not security-related get pushed into the distribution channel.

Because RedHat is no longer geared to that market.

[emil]

I would love to pay RedHat $50/year, receive the media in the mail (not the box set, just the cds in a paper sleeve), and have access to up2date.

RedHat isn't going to offer that to me. Instead, they want $50 from me simply for access to their security updates, and they now support their OS for a much shorter duration than Microsoft. They also complain about the bandwidth requirements, but they certainly haven't implemented torrent within up2date.

RedHat now has Oracle's ring securely in their nose. This is a good thing, and it will make them a lot of money, as we have seen. However, a good database server is not necessarily a good desktop or a good general purpose server. RedHat Linux is specializing on enterprise applications.

I'd love to pay RedHat a few bucks, if they had a product that I wanted to buy. They don't.

RedHat Enterprise business model

[_Sprocket_]

Most of Redhats revenue comes from selling per-seat licenses of the "Linux enterprise linux", not services or support.

What do you think RedHat Enterprise Linux is? It might help to compare it to other distros. Heck - compare it to RedHats own standard distro. Look at the differences.

Enterprise Linux includes an update architecture. Not only are the latest software projects and packages stuffed in to handy RPMs, but the license also involves an on-site update server for your enterprise. The update server pulls its updates and your RedHat Linux systems get their updates from your own update server. As an aside, some software will only be available in RPM packages if you have a Enterprise license (although source will still be available at no cost).

Enterprise Linux is also a slower-paced distribution aimed at providing a stable target for commercial development. Part of that is staying a bit more constant on libraries and other system internals. Part of it will also be coordinating with third party developers to ensure that their product works and they are comfortable with the target platform. Want something from Oracle or Veritas for Linux? Most likely they'll only support your purchase if you deploy on RedHat Enterprise Linux.

That's not to say you can't do a lot of this stuff yourself. You can build your own RPMs of the specialty "Enterprise" software. You can download all the other RPMs. Use apt-rpm. Set up your own repositories and/or cache packages. You can get the latest offering from Oracle or Veritas and get it running on your own Linux distro of choice without their help. In short, you can do it yourself.

And there you have it. Do it yourself. Or have RedHat do it as a part of their Enterprise product line.

Redhat Enterprise Linux is a service.

Re:How does it feel ?

[cje]

You know, posts like this are why I like browsing Slashdot with a +6 Flamebait modifier. :)

You say that "Red Hat makes cash from volunteer work and don't [sic] give back." First of all, the most obvious point to make is that there is nothing requiring them to "give back" anything. All that they have to do, according to the GPL, is to make sure that they continue to release the source code to the software. They are not required to make yearly donations to GNU or to the EFF.

Second, they do give back. The money that Red Hat makes doesn't all go straight into Bob Young's wallet. Red Hat has lots of developers that are working on lots of things, such as cluster management and IP load balancing. These are capabilities that benefit the community as a whole, and the money flowing into Red Hat allows them to pay talented developers to make a lot of useful contributions to the operating system and its supporting software. What's wrong with that?

Finally, your assertion that Red Hat is making money off of OSS developers is pretty silly. The basic functionality of any Red Hat release is still freely-downloadable over the Internet. Red Hat is not making its millions of dollars from Joe Linux User buying a boxed set of CDs at Egghead. Instead, they're making money from businesses and corporations who are buying Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (for example) at $2,499 a pop. These people are not shelling out money for Mozilla or Apache. They're paying for things like 24x7 tech support, Red Hat Network subscriptions for OS upgrades and security patches, the additional "enterprise" capability provided by the more-expensive products, hardcopy documentation, etc.

Your average Red Hat home user needs none of this, which is why your average Red Hat home user doesn't pay a dime for his/her distribution. Those of us who have been using Linux for more than a decade have been fighting hard to get it into our places of work, and the types of things that Red Hat (and others) are now providing, such as round-the-clock support, are exactly the types of things that the PHB types wanted to see before they would allow it in. I know that there are plenty of purist types who believe that nobody should be allowed to make a red cent off of software, but I'm inclined to cut Red Hat some slack here. They're helping to increase Linux acceptance in mainstream IT shops by leaps and bounds.

Thank You

[p.rican]

my point exactly...but you beat me to the post. Contributing code isn't the only way to contribute to the linux kernel. People forget that many linux distributor's are employing the top kernel hackers so they can feed their families and contribute code on their own time...

Re:Thank You

[Bull999999]

I third that. You don't have to be a coder to contribute to open source projects. If you can't code, you can still contribute by donating cash (tax deductable in most cases!), setting up mirrors, and/or form user groups and provide free support.

Re:How does it feel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

>capitalism != greed

Yeah, right... Some folks might disagree on that sentiment, and some just don't know what hit them, e.g. Richard Grasso.

Extraordinarily expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

1500/year for free software (RHEL-AS 2.1). You *must* pay for a year of this if you get the bits from redhat and install it, for every system.

With hardware vendors only certifying this OS, the free-software value proposition takes a massive hit. Going from zero to one dollar per OS is a huge deal in the IT enterprise. The best part of "free" software is the fact that you don't have to hire spreadsheet engineers to make sure you're paying RedHat, every year, on the year.

More money for the SCO countersuit!

[Teahouse]

Put that profit to good use Red Hat.

Anyone else find it humorous that Red Hat takes in more anually ($122m) than SCO ($68m)?

Re:anthropomorphize THIS

[Anonymous Coward]

Without getting into the whole debate about whether it makes sense to anthropomorphize ideas and code by saying the overused phrase "Software wants to be Free"...

How is there any "debate" over whether it makes sense to ascribe mental states to software? It obviously doesn't! People who speak that way clearly aren't speaking literally.

How is this even an issue?

Linux Does well when the Economy Does Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes it like booze and movies!

Re:What's terrifying - KARMA WHORE!

[God! Awful 2]

Oh... I see... You "replied" to the only comment that is currently moderated at +5, so you hope that your statements will be more visible there, and hopefully moderated up. How is this called again? Karma whore!


Actually, strangely enough I replied to this comment when it was scored "+1, Insightful". (I give ACs +1 as well, so that makes it +2 for me.)

There's something in the posting guidelines for this site about it being preferable to post to existing threads rather than create new ones. So I picked a comment that was in a similar vein to mine and replied to that.

-a

Redhat support

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay for redhat network. It's my way giving to the linux community. I still have my redhat 5.2 disk's. Sure I use other linux's too, But we need a company like redhat to keep linux going strong!!

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[j3110]

People don't try to make a name for a product with large ad campaigns in order to destroy it.

IBM is always working on something for the open source community, and their business plan is to switch all their clients to Linux.

http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/

Just click the drop down box for a better list than I can come up with.

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[volkerdi]

Now, if I recall properly, Red Hat was derived from the BOGUS Linux distribution by Rik Faith. Rik later wrote the package utilities PMS and PM for Red Hat, and Erik Troan and Marc Ewing used those as the basis for RPM version one.

I doubt BOGUS was a Slackware fork -- the structure was quite a bit different. But I'd like to think that Slackware might have helped them accompish their first compiles, and maybe given them some ideas. Several config files did make it over, at least.

Re:How does it feel ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The money that Red Hat makes doesn't all go straight into Bob Young's wallet.

Not any more. His wallet filled up, and he left to start a circus. I knew Bob in the days before Red Hat, and I think it's fair to say that he was the first slimy-suit-guy to enter the scene. I watched him play the favors of several groups making them all think they were about to hit the big jackpot (served them right perhaps?) while using them to fund his secret distro and planning to backstab them all. There are mountains of money he owned people that was dragged out as long as possible, and ultimately never paid. This effectively destroyed the competition by bleeding them of cash.

It's fair to say that Bob Young is the Bill Gates of the Linux world. He's not responsible for any great innovation. If the Linux economy hadn't become so one sided I believe we would have seen a lot more great things by now instead of one rich Linux company and a lot of struggling projects.

redhat source code

[David Jao]

Is the source code for Red Hat's installers available?

Yes: anaconda source rpms

How about their build and dependency system ... ?

The build and dependency system is all inside the rpm program and associated libraries. Here are the source rpms for rpm. If you are worried about chicken and egg installation issues, an rpm tarball is available here.

How about their build and dependency ... database?

The actual (complete) package database for redhat 9 is available in this little known gem of a package which is included in redhat but not installed by default (and IMO should be). The spec file for rebuilding the package database can be obtained from the corresponding source rpm, provided you have a copy of all of the redhat rpms for a particular version.

In general, almost everything in redhat includes source code. If you have to ask, the source is probably available. There are a few rare instances where redhat does not provide the source code, but these are pretty obscure and you have to know redhat fairly well to run into these programs -- so well that you wouldn't need to be asking in the first place!

Their countersuit probably helped.

[BoneFlower]

Their stockholders and customers probably saw that Red Hat was standing up to SCO, and that would have calmed them down a lot.

This is prob. redundant by now, but...

[evilpenguin]

Shouldn't

insert(&mouth, FOOT);

be written as:

mouth.insert(FOOT);

?

Just a suggestion for the less objecty out there...

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[NickFortune]

My point is that people should not expect making money if they mainly give away what they produce.

"Expect" - gotcha.

Hell, even selling the stuff is a dodgy proposition, you shouldn't expect to make money even from giving it away. Not that I begrudge anyone who manages the trick...

Re:How to make money with Open Source

[Kashif Shaikh]

They wrote RPM. They bought Cygnus and open-sourced the software.

Re:Open Source is right!

[Anonymous Coward]

> I cannot talk about FreeBSD, my experience with Debian is that they are always a few steps behind for a matter of stability. ...
> BTW I used a Dell box to try out Knoppix (which is Debian based) and have not met any problems.

Debian stable is, yes, a few steps behind in the interests of stability. Knoppix is based on Debian unstable, and is leading edge. Debian testing is a few weeks behind unstable in current-ness. You get to pick the point on the stability/current-ness curve you want to be on, it's not all one thing or another.

How does this bode for the SCO suit?

[shadow_slicer]

Isn't Redhat suing SCO because of the statements/threats/FUD that SCO has been spouting have damaged their business?

Couldn't SCO use this news to have the suit dismissed because a company posting record earnings probably hasn't suffered too badly from bad publicity.

Anybody have a clue about this?

Re:Open Source is right!

[frp001]

Agreed.
My point is that I doubt there is any evil conspiration between Dell and RedHat to design some secret modules that other distros would be barred from.

Besides if my memories are correct, by entering the Dell service number on their support site, you get to know the full contents of you box. If not, stuff like scanpci or other do the job fine.

Re:They must be doing something right?

[CAIMLAS]

I wasn't contesting this train of logic, but vb.warrior's lack of any logic at all.

Re:They must be doing something right?

[smithmc]

And I s'pose you pay for all the software you use, right?

Well, yeah, actually, if the author/publisher wants money for it. If it's a fair price, I pay it. If not, I do without, or look for a free alternative. If I don't need it to be flashy or fast etc., maybe I'll write my own. Anything else is known as "stealing".

OT: So, how are Sendmail and Nominum doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sendmail sells the MTA and a mail server (hard to tell from their web page) and apparantly something anti-spam that i've never seen.

Nominum sells BIND and support for BIND.

Are either of these companies viable?

Re:Because RedHat is no longer geared to that mark

[lemox]

RedHat isn't going to offer that to me. Instead, they want $50 from me simply for access to their security updates

Um... you do know that you can use up2date for free. You just have to fill out a few surveys now and then, and occasionally you have to wait a bit when the servers are overloaded for paying customers.

connection

[GISGEOLOGYGEEK]

The success of companies such as Red Hat is great. Nice to see alternatives. However it probably also explains the results presented in that recent /. article declaring that Linux systems have edged out Windows systems in becoming victims to cyber attacks. Now that Linux is becoming a real player in the industry, its time to fix all the vulnerabilities that went unnoticed simply due to Linux being too rare to be worth the bother of attacking. One of my professors liked to complain how there's a new windows patch out every day. I've found that my red hat linux computer gets far more bug/security fix alerts.

Re:Microsoft Diving into Linux

[code_echelon]

I think Microsoft would be mistaken to jump into the Linux market. Thay are going to have a hard time convincing people to buy there new Linux based OS when most of the Linux community is now anti MS for life. Also they have been insulting and bashing Linux for years so this would definately hurt there credibility with the people in which they still had some left. Linux is not going to be owned by Microsoft and as for SCO listen to Linus.

Re:Hooray for Windows 95 disk version

[code_echelon]

I find that the Windows 95 disk version of Windows is by far one of the best that Microsoft has created. It is the only true Windows experience the rest are just cheap clones.

Not hard when ou can charge everyone...

[$ASANY]

Here's a great business model that'll get you $1.92 bil in net income pretty quick--

Make every car manufacturer collect a royalty for you for the engine in their product, regardless of whether your engine is actually installed and used or not. Make every coffee maker vendor collect a royalty for you for the beans that will be used to brew your coffee, regardless of the actual beans used. This is the MicroSloth model. This is your reality right now.

But heck, complain enough about this and you're an enemy of "innovation" and thus worthy of a good flogging. Just like malicious code targetting MS products are a threat to "innovation" instead of a reason to actually engage in it. Forking dumbwits.

insert appropriate .sig here

for the investment inclined..

[ncstockguy]

RHAT's earnings growth is way better than most financial analysts expected. And it is really just beginning to accelerate. Their large partners ie IBM ORCL and others just now have their sales forces actually primed to begin bundling RHAT with their solution packages. So don't be surprised if earnings growth continues to accelerate over the next several years. And what is the key driver of stock prices? Earnings of course. All else is noise. Foreign markets starting to kick in too...
http://biz.yahoo.com/c/20030919/u.html?rha t
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp? sou rce=blq/yhoo&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo&guid=%7BADDF54A E%2D7F3B%2D41CB%2DBDAF%2DC2ADB0998418%7D

Re:Because RedHat is no longer geared to that mark

[emil]

Occasionally? Toward the end with 6.2, the only time that I could use up2date was on Saturday at 3am.

up2date is unusable as a free service.

Re:Hooray for Windows 95 disk version

[Sj0]

Windows 2000 is a terrible clone of the true "windows Experience". Sure, you get plenty of viruses if you use IE or Outlook, but if you're just running 2k, you don't get nearly as many crashes, which is really dissapointing for those seeking the true Windows Experience. :)

Nah, go for Debian... but if you want it slack,

[leonbrooks]

go for Mandrake. Too easy. Too many instant experts, just add mouse. (-:

Dead, but still twitching.

[leonbrooks]

Subject says it all.

Re:Because RedHat is no longer geared to that mark

[lemox]

Actually, it was like that for me as well, until a little after 9 was released. It seems they got a bigger pipe.

Re:Because RedHat is no longer geared to that mark

[emil]

That's about when I dumped them for good, and either locked down my remaining 6.2 servers or fdisked them.

The bigger pipe was unnecessary; they could have integrated bittorrent.