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Red Hat Listed Among 50 Top Tech Companies
Kelvin Ekston writes " Red Hat is listed among ZDNet Asia's 50 Top Tech companies 2006. It is also one of the fastest growing companies with 210.4% year on year income growth over 4 years.
While almost all Linux companies grapple with the perennial question of how they can make money through software subscriptions and services rather than selling packaged boxes, Red Hat finally managed to improve credibly and match the hype with substance and show the way to do business with Linux. That's the way to go!"
The ad sponsors for the link are IBM, EMC and Redhat. Can you guess which three companies are on the list?
check out http://www.centos.org/
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
Redhat, everyone should agree, is one of the biggest players in a space we all know is growing nicely, and already has a pretty solid presence in the business space.
Cracking the top 50 isn't surprising, or terribly newsworthy.
That said, it's more proof that Linux® is on the radar screen, which is nice.
-- Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
It's a relatively easy feat to increase profits from Zero just two years ago.
I don't respond to AC's.
Agreed. I find it amusing that I've found even things like working with apt easier on Fedora than I did on my Debian box (before I converted it over), given that I first learned apt through Debian like many here. Perhaps it's because there are so many well-maintained RPM repositories like Dag, Dries, et al out there.
My whole office at work uses RHEL - works well, although it doesn't have as wide of RPM support as Fedora, and software stays further behind.
Did you really name your son "Robert');DROP TABLE Students;--"?
Sure they grow their income, but by that's flogging training, support and having an underpaid skeletal staff and not actually doing that much?
Ever *used* RH support in a corporate environment? If your query is beyond RTFM it's a constant battle to get anywhere. Plus their QA is terrible given they're competing on the corporate level - we've had hanging kernels (on pretty stock hardware) and endless dodgy packages we've had to replace.
There's this endless love in on messageboards because they're FOSS promoters and actually comply to the GPL, but when it comes to working with them if you're corporate and you don't have a sizeable contract with them (ie. govt or multinational) their product in terms of service is no where near close to what you'd expect from other vendors in the market.
Ad man on phone:- Hey IBM/Redhat/EMC, you're featured as a top player. How's about a bit of sponsorship?
IBM/Redhat/EMC Publicity guy:- Hmm, a survey that makes us look good - yes, we'll put out names along side that.
Cause and effect are not always straightforward.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Some days it seems like some folks put them just a step above Microsoft.
I talk about stuff.
It's interesting to see that they've managed this with less than 1000 employees. Only two others in the list are comparable in this respect. Plenty of other companies on the list have thousands or tens or thousands of employees.
Red Hat's stock is on an astronomical PE ratio, higher even than Google's. It's pretty instructive comparing the PE ratio to, say, Novell's which is about a tenth as high.
So, I guess it's clear the financial market is very much buying the line that "Red Hat is Linux", perhaps much more than was the case a year or two ago. Nice news if you're Red Hat. Not so nice for anyone else.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
The article says RedHat had 36% revenue growth over 4 years. How does that equal 210% year-over-year growth? Am I missing something?
Maybe my RHCE certification will land me a job now! *gets hopes up*
Question is, with all of this emerging interest in Red Hat, why hasn't it already gotten me a job? I haven't seen (around here, in Ottawa, anyway) any sharp rise in the number of Linux-related jobs available. So, who's buying all of this support?
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
Ok, nevermind. The article with tons of text is confusing. The top-50 chart is where they got the big numbers from.
You made that claim for Apple based on just one version of their server OS? Based on my experience, 10.3 was a nightmare. 10.4 seems more stable, offers better compatibility with Active Directory, and the command line management even though is available since 10.3, seems more useful now. In 10.3, every time I had to manage anything, I had to go to the server room and in Linux, unless there is a need I never am at the terminal. My take, give it some time and then decide, its too early to draw conclusions.
Good on Red Hat. How many times has this "business model" failed, continues to fail, or barely makes it? This way of doing business really relies on the scruples of the company. Financially, it isn't in their best interest to keep packages up to date. The longer they drag their feet, the more money they keep making in their subscriptions. It's like Code Sourcery. They port the GNU tool-chain for use on embedded platforms like ARM. They also give out their changes and such like they have to. What's to say what they give out doesn't have a few bugs that were fixed a long time ago but haven't quite made it to the free public version. If you pay them for support maybe you get a less buggy version.
I'm not skeptical of when a person does this for free and just relases the source. That's cool. When a company has to generate money by basically, fixing bugs and/or some customization, I think you need to be skeptical.
Just my paranoid thoughts on it I guess.
Just out of curiousity, why does anyone care about Red Hat? Their product isn't free. You can't go out and download a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
I'm going to get modded flamebait, but their business model is identical to Microsoft's. The only way to get Red Hat Linux is to buy it from them. If you aren't a paying customer, you mean zero to them.
Sure it's possible to build a system that is mostly the same at no cost, but you aren't running Red Hat and they won't give you any support if you run into problems.
If that's the case, then why is RedHat dipping following analyst downgrades?
You have a lot more faith in Apple's business ability than I do. Apple has always managed to survive but has seemed to be the future of the OS for the last twenty years. Apple has never been willing to allow their vertical integration to be broken (even with the move to Intel chips), and thus is always a niche market. For better or worse I don't see this changing.
Now, I have used Linux as my primary desktop at home for six years. In that time, it has improved more than any other desktop solution in terms of look and feel, but it was adequate from a productivity perspective even in 1999. Both Gnome and KDE have similarly improved.
What holds back Linux on the desktop is simply fear of change and fear of a lack of interoperability with MS products. These issues are being delt with quickly and I expect that within a short time both issues will be mitigated sufficiently to allow larger corporations to move quickly to Linux with only a bit more effort than upgrading Windows. With any luck we will be close to that before Vista really starts to become commonplace.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Let's face it, Red Hat's amaturish "desktop" offerings and lame marketing can't and won't overthrow Micrsoft.
Troll.
Red hat do not compete in the desktop space. Nice try.
As the future of Unix, Apple is also making strong claims on the server and super computer markets. Apples success with the Virginia Tech supercomputer is proof that Apple is opening up a lead in the top-end of the market.
Troll
You mean the way Linux "rules" Supercomputers with an estimated 60% of the top 500?
There seems to be an emerging consensus in Slashdot land that Apple and OS X is the future of Unix and the sole legitmate claimaint to the king of the desktop.
*sighs* Troll... modded up to +3 by apple fanboys - how predictable.
My pics.
... of salt.
going from barely making anything to making just a bit more can be a dramatic % growth but still not necessarily reflect a thriving business model which will generate year over year growth.
I personally put some money into RedHat last summer. Not enough to bankrupt me or to get rich, you understand, but I'm currently sitting on about 41% equity growth.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I thought it odd that F5 Networks was there, but Google wasn't...
I DID like that RH made the list with 800 employees...compared to 11,000 for Apple, or 56,000 for M$.
My
What I don't get is why they made yum the "preferred" way. Yum is so much slower and more cumbersome than apt.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
That should be sodium chloride. Though if you want to use sodium fluoride on bullshit (or indeed food), I won't stop you. I'll just not eat in the same restraunts.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's the way to go!
Yes, but unfortunately, Red Hat was there first. Similar models will get the proverbial "but how are you any different than Red Hat?". So just because it worked for them doesn't mean someone can start now to try to copy the same model for open source. Red Hat is so comprehensive with their services that to try to compete now, especially since it would be *against* them, is an effort in futility.
Not that this is a bad thing, I'm glad for them, but to say that there is a model that works and to suggest that now others can emulate them and succeed is a bit presumptuous. After all, if their services were "bad", they probably wouldn't be a successful model.
http://www.fool.com/news/mft/2005/mft05100301.htm? source=eptyholnk303100&logvisit=y&npu=y&bounce=y&b ounce2=y
"Shares surged nearly 30% higher on the news -- and with good reason. The company is experiencing sequential improvement in the current quarter as more corporate customers take a shine to open-source solutions."
RHAT is now at $23.13 a share.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=RHAT&t=5y
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
But I've found Scientific Linux (another RHEL rebuild) to be better than Centos, overall. The problem with RHEL-derived distributions is that next to none of the RPM repositories will work with them, because many of the packages are archaic.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Look at something like AMD (the automounter, not the chip) and NFS. Wanna lock up your Mac OS X box? Merely access the automount point (/net for us). The finder and AMD don't mix. WTF? It's been this way from 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and now 10.4. Yes, 10.4 is better. Waaaaay better than just a couple of revs ago. Mature it is not. In 10 years it might have a chance, though remote, of being as stable as Linux and Solaris are today.
In general, when I have some opensource package I need to compile and install on all the UNIX boxes here, what system will make me spend 90% of the time on it? That's right, Mac OS X. Yes, 10.4 is better, but I could waste whole days trying to get crap to compile on 10.3 and before.
It should be noted that Red Hat != Linux. Red Hat today is overhyped, though I still use their projects (Fedora, etc) for a number of customers. Also though they have come through a very painful transition, I think that people expect more from them than they can deliver (look at their P/E ratio for example). And I am not convinced that *despite desktop offerings* like RHEL Desktop, I don't think that they really understand the market beyond the engineer's desktop. Red Hat has been important largely because they did prove the concept of open source business. But I think that soon they may become a victim of their own success.
I do think that Novell is today better positioned to grow, and they have showed that they are genuinely interested in opening up a large number of their products. If they take their strategy to its logical end, they could easily userp Red Hat's position as *the* open source Linux solutions leader. What would be required for them to do this would be opening up their directory services software, and some other things.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'm hoping someone'll put together a "best of" compilation, using what's stable (and what can be made stable) from the RPM repositories - including Fedora - but optimized much more aggressively. I would, but I don't have the bandwidth or the disk space to carry a distro. If someone was interested in hosting, that would be another matter. I'd certainly be willing to compile the code and upload it to a host site.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're so obviously retarded, I need to work through this one point at a time.
> BAH!!! REDCRAP is the WORST piece of shit I've ever used. We just bought a bunch of
> RHEL 4 AS licenses, and it has been a freaking nightmare. Support sucks, and takes
> it own sweet time if it's not something easily found. And they'll ask you to test things
> out for things that they've confirmed to be issues - WTF? If you FSCKING know it's an
> issue, you can FSCKING TEST IT OUT YOURSELF, damned lazy bastards.
Lazy? Have you any idea how long it could take to *accurately* reproduce a problematic
environment for this kind of work? It may not even be possible. By asking you to help out,
they are helping *YOU* out - FOSS is all about co-operation btw.
> I also like the way they push things off to others. Oh, disk druid is broken? Use fdisk.
> Umm, excuse me, but where's fdisk when I'm trying to install? And why aren't you putting
> in a ticket to engineering to get it fixed?
It's on virtual console 2 (Alt-F2, or Ctrl-Alt-F2 if you're using graphical). Learn to use
the tools in your hands before criticising the help offered by others. Or find out what a
kickstart %pre script is good for.
> And I especially love the way everything is bundled together. So, now, my choice is waste
> 1G of disk space on win2k, or waste 1G of disk space on REDCRAP, when all I'm trying to
> do is run a freaking web server?!
You installed your webserver with a pre-defined package profile? What are you? Fscking crazy?
Learn to do a kickstart like everyone else and have *only* the packages you select.
Oh, wait, you probably don't even know what packages you want or need.
*sharpens the clue-by-four*
> Oh, oh, lets not even mention the fact that RHEL4 can't even run, out of the box, on
> platforms that they advertize for!!!! Yeah, go perform a default install of RHEL4 on a
> dual core opteron, reboot, and watch it hang. Why the fsck do you put in the smp kernel,
> if it doesn't fucking work?
You mean the dual core opterons that weren't even available as engineering samples at the
time RHEL4 was being cut? Ahh, of course, Red Hat should have just used their magic crystal
ball. In the mean time, install update 2 like the rest of the sane world.
Oh, and RHEL doesn't even come in a box. It's a *subscription*. But you knew that right?
> And of course, the support and registration sites going up and down, and taking more than
> 24 hours to get my damned registration in.
Works for me. Perhaps you need to use a working web browser? Or maybe the fault is between
chair and keyboard?
> And lets not talk about how much fun it was doing an up2date to go from RHEL 4 to RHEL 4
> U1 and U2. Freaking dependency failures, and killing the box so bad that it can't reboot,
> and needing a re-install.
OK, now I just don't believe you. Oh, wait, you didn't kill an up2date/RPM process did you?
Or reboot? Bwaahahahahahaaaha HALOF!
> 2. ftp and http both support resumption of downloads, so if REDCRAP's servers can't
> support this, this is a REDCRAP issue, isn't it?
RHN downloads use wget or curl by preference. Please consult the manual pages.
Also, please investigate the carriage return key on your keyboard - it's very useful.
Mod me down if you want, but a few years ago, pets.com could have been listed there too.
This may be an indication of great things to come, or it could be the start of the much speculated upon Linux bubble.
Don't jump to conclusions.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
There is room for a distribution which uses Fedora as a starting point and builds what you really want/need from that - much the same way Slackware grew out of SLS. Remember, nobody has ever assumed Open Source solutions to be perfect, or we'd still be using the MCC distribution, Shoestring for the boot-loader (hey, it was a damn good boot-loader!) and X10 for the GUI. (I dare someone to find a still-running, still-in-use X10 server.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Just curious... at first glance they all look to be publicly held.
I absolutely agree. Anyone who thinks that OS X currently belongs in a server room has obviously never tried to use it there. After just a year running OS X for our file server, we switched to Linux. Our shop isn't as diverse as yours, but we run Solaris, Tru64, and lots of different Linuces, and I can agree: OS X is *by far* the least stable.
Another one bites the dust
Its not suprising. I use Ret Hat Enterprise Server 3 all the time at work, and it beats the hell outa any other distro in the business field IMO.
The only way Linux - or any other OS - is going to survive is to play fair but play hard and never, ever give ground to Microsoft. When boundaries are not recognized and courtesy is not respected, the only hope for enduring is to throw caution to the wind and charge.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I a unix/linux systems engineer. I can tell you Redhat Linux AS 2.1 was anything but advanced. Sure EMC and Oracle supported it. But there was NO LVM! No Support for Extended ACLS! And the infamous low EMEM bug when you are under heavy I/O. If I compiled a fix in Oracle wasn't going to support it. The servers are Dell PowerEdge 6650's with 8GB RAM connected to an EMC SAN via Qlogic HBAs. I managed to tame the beast, but managing the filesystems without an LVM is a pain.
The ERP project has grown, so when the lease is up on the Dell equipment it looks like we are going with the IBM pSeries. Why... basically we need the I/O.
I've achieved 97% uptime but the credit is mine, not Redhat's. Redhat staff is brain dead when it comes to cutting edge solutions. I solved my problems before Redhat was ever on the trail.
I haven't been able to upgrade to Redhat AS 4.0 since according to the usenet groups Oracle RAC and 10g perform poorly with SAN attached storage, 50% of the throughput I have on the heavily patched Redhat AS 2.1
Bottom line, if you are going to roll out Linux throughtout your Enterprise you need engineers like me on your staff, not Redhat. I believe the public will catch on and the Redhat stock will take a nosedive. Unless they hire engineers with experience in the Enterprise.
They need to take a good solid look. What I am personally looking at is licensing from Oracle. I believe the whole Redhat / Oracle Grid deal is to sell as many oracle licenses as you can. Need more horsepower? Add a database node?
An Additional database node means more money for Ellison, and less money in your IT budget. So we are now looking at
running the backend on a IBM p570 or a p590 and host many
databases there. The business decided that Disaster Recovery is more important than HA! Why... 9iRAC takes 4 minutes to failover. Also.. sometimes failovers fail.
Some of the bugs may have been worked out in 10g.
Anyway have your read the latest news at Oracle? Sun is now the preferred Oracle platform of the month again.
That's not goinf to help redhat's stock.
Believe it or not I've been a Linux fan since 1992.
Yggrasill was the release I cut my teeth on.
I've been using it ever since.
I was very dissapointed to see what redhat did.
This is not only going to hurt Redhat. But then again, Linux was never written with the intent to make money.
It has however helped many Computer scientists and professionals improve on thier careers. It helped me stay on top of my game and earn a decent salary.
I would not recommend buying Redhat Stock.
Maybe you should start bathing before interviews?
feh. stuff.
Not only that. MacOS/X does not have a true Xserver.
The power of X11 allows you to run from the server/desktop
and display anywhere. You can't do that with macOS/X.
And.. have you ever managed macOS/X hacked version of LDAP?
Try implementing that for 600 users. OpenLDAP is better and easier to manage on an enterprise scale.
Every dealing I have with them is a strange mixture of trying to be too cutting edge at times, and at others so terrified of even straightforward patches required to avoid panics. In general when I deal with them, I invariably get someone who has a huge ego that exceeds their ability. The fact I've had so many dealings with them speaks volumes on the QA issues. Once I did deal with some RedHat folks in the UK, and they seemed more level headed than the US RedHat folks, admittedly.
By far, I have had immense success dealing with and deploying SuSE. I haven't had to actually deal with them since the Novell buyout, but at least back then the support and path to someone appropriately competent was reasonable. They were prepared to take very sane courses of action to get problem resolution. They never seemed too paranoid of patches nor did they try to push things too far feature-wise. These occurances where I have to deal with them are once in a blue moon, which speaks highly of their support (use RHEL4 and SLES9 in various capacities to this day, but have only had to deal with RedHat support despite heavy SLES usage).
On a technical and support level in an enterprise, SuSE by far has my recommendation.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
LMFAO Of course RHEL 2.1 AS has no LVM support, it was created four friggin years ago! And lets face it LVM on Linux back then was not what you would call, um, stable or reliable. But lets also look at what Red Hat has done with RHEL 2.1 AS. They've published updated and bug fixes over the last four years, and another 3 years into the future. It's still a reliable platform, even if it is no longer a modern one. And seriously, holding Red Hat accountable for what Oracle or some SAN provider is doing is ludacris. Like they have any control over the Oracle sourcecode or QA at another corporation, or licensing agreements offered by other companies on unrelated add-on products. There's a reason Oracle installs itself in /opt. I mean, That's like saying that Fedora sucks because your Nvidia graphics card doesn't work right, *mutters* with the binary drivers I downloaded from Nvidia and have nothing to do with Red Hat nor included in any part with the Red Hat distribution...
You want to talk about hinky agreements, how about the fact that SUN sales reps got kickbacks from Oracle based on the number of per CPU Oracle licenses they sold! Like that didn't encourage the sales people to tell the customer they need an extra 2 CPUs to really do the Oracle operations they wanted. I'm sure Red Hat has problems, like every other company, but dinging them because of crap that other companies do is silly.
-Runz
Just as a note...
The reason Red Hat does not offer RHEL4 DVDs as a download from Red Hat Network is that there is a two Gigabyte download limit for files in Apache. FYI
-Runz
P.S. Tried http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ lately? You can request features and submit bug reports for developers to work on. It is still open source, so if they don't move at a speed that is acceptable, you could always just suck it up and do it yourself....
Gentoo is OK, but I've broken the ebuild system many times because (again) dependency checking on the part of the distro maintainers is not what it should or could me. OpenBSD is OK too, but I'd personally use MirBSD for most things. There is a risk, when using untested packages with an OS that is secure through audits, of opening security holes through unintentional interactions. I don't know how much additional checking MirBSD gets to keep the risks down, but because it is designed to be more extensive than OpenBSD - while being built on the same basic codebase - it could be more secure than OpenBSD in cases where you need those extensions.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
apt still does not handle multilib install, even when using RPM as the package format - on x86-64, with yum you can have glib2.i386 and glib2.x86-64 installed side-by-side, so you can run 32-bit apps (like OpenOffice) without resorting to having a parallel chroot install, or a custom-packaged OOo RPM (which is how Ubuntu does it)
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
...my USD 200 worth of shares in 2001, when they were worth about 6 USD each. I bought through http://www.sharepeople.co.uk/ but sold because they shares were not going anywhere and the Sharepeople fees were chewing the money at an alarming rate.
Now I wonder if I should've been bolder. I could have spent USD 5,000 on RHAT shares instead of leaving the money in my savings account in the bank. Now the shares are worth USD 22 the result would be USD 18,000! Even if Sharepeople had taken 1,000 dollars in fees in that time, it would still be 17,000 USD now...
I didn't go into this looking for 6 hour or 6 month gains, and I won't be selling my shares any time soon, barring some downturn in business that causes me to reevaluate. I'm not much of a speculator or trader. I tend to buy and hold long-term. That's why I specifically worded my post to indicate a growth in equity, and not in dollars.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
... but it's actually easier to lose money.
-pyrrho
This is not a study of anything, it is just an edititorial fill in piece giving the opinion of cnet as to who the top 50 tech companies in Asia are. Odd that most of the notebook ODMs are missing, they obviously don't spend enough marketing dollars (Dell is on the list and Compal is not? Compal make most of the Dell notebooks as well as notebooks for most of other companies on the list). Perhaps they just should have rated it as the top 50 cnet advertisers in Asia, then at least it would have made more sence.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Very good post Jokkey
LVM existed 4 years ago. I used it. Remember the IBM/SUSE relationship in 2001??? Well IBM ported
LVM to Linux and it was included in SUSE since version 6.3! That's over 4 years ago. Technically
SUSE was more advanced than RedHat. The only thing Redhat was good generating money from the blood and sweat of open source developers. SUSE innovated.
The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) - Part 1
Michael Hasenstein
This document describes the LVM in SUSE LINUX. It is freely distributable as long as it remains unchanged. The original version of this document (PDF) can be obtained at http://www.suse.com/oracle/.
The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) - Part 1
Michael Hasenstein
This document describes the LVM in SUSE LINUX. It is freely distributable as long as it remains unchanged. The original version of this document (PDF) can be obtained at http://www.suse.com/oracle/.
SUSE has included a Logical Volume Manager since SUSE LINUX 6.3. The LVM in SUSE LINUX is Heinz Mauelshagen's implementation, the homepage is now available at http://www.sistina.com/lvm/.
SUSE Inc. 2001
Michael Hasenstein
Like I said, I've been active in the Linux Community since 1992.
last time I check 2GB is not a problem for bittorent!
so don't be pissed at red hat's product, be pissed at the "decision maker" in your company who decided to go with red hat without these features you so desperately need.
the sunshine bores the daylights out of me
When RedHat's stock takes a nosedive, I'm sure you and your company will be among the first to put money into OSS to meet the void left by Redhat...right?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Critizing is one thing, but have you read some of the brain dead comments comming out? What exactly is the point of your post?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I have to say, we purchased RHEL 4 for our database machine, and when the performance of the new machine was 1/4 the performance of a machine with half the number of processors, we naturally wanted to speak to someone at Red Hat. After all, support was the only reason we went with RHEL over CentOS. Well after a lot of phone tag we finally scheduled a conference call with one of their engineers. We call them up and we're placed on the phone with a sales engineer who said he'd relay our questions to a real engineer, and suggested that we look for help in online resources. Really! Now, I can understand their not wanting to put a software engineer on the phone when he has better things to do, but when we ask to speak with a technical person, we want to speak with someone who can answer our questions. We don't need an intermediary to relay stuff. Anyway, after that we ditched RedHat and moved back to CentOS. With the support not there, there's really no reason to buy a RHEL license. It's sad, but if you're charging for support, you better make sure it's some damn good support. And yeah, we only had one license, like $1200 or something, but if we'd known we'd be getting such a low level of support we'd have not even spent that. Don't get me wrong, I think RHEL is a great product, but if you're charging for support, then that should be pretty good support.
rooooar
Seems to work fine.
Not much profit, if you ask me. Redhat made $44.9 million in Net Income in its 2005 fiscal year. The year before $14.0, 2003 -6.6, 2002 -140(!!). In its history this company has cumulatively lost $174 million dollars!
And they just announced last night that they are going to have to pay $20 million into this organization that is buying up patents to protect linux from lawsuits. Of course, from an accounting perspective that's an investment, not an expense. Considering there will be no return from this 'investment', maybe we should consider that it would wipe out half of last years profits if looked at as an expense.
Which number were you looking for ? 49? 51? 501 and a half? Excuse me, but I don't understand your post.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?