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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.
Sorry to say this, but selling software is dead. There is no money to be made in it. ;)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
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.
Karma Clown
Here is the report those numbers come from if anybody is interested. Forgot to include a link in the previous post.
- b
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.
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>
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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).
SuSE also allows FTP installation of its latest distribution. It is a common misaprehension that they only supply "demo-mode" CDs.