Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
If that's the case, then why is RedHat dipping following analyst downgrades?
Oh, I have nearly 15 years of proven skill. I think what I'm getting at here is, there is a sizeable amount of demand for RH services and/or support -- yet people who are certified with their products seem to find less demand than, say, MCSE.
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
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.
That's a "Microsoft Answer"(TM).
.. RedHat won't recognize you then.
Sure, you *can* download a RHEL. It's just called Centos. Or WhiteBox.
But you're right
= Grow a brain...
... 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
Every tech I've ever met that has moved to Vancouver from Ottawa has talked about how far behind in technology the average infrastructure in Ottawa is. They blame it on the fact that Ottawa has a lot of goverment jobs. Based on that (and only that, I've never worked or been to Ottawa) I'd guess that an RHCE wouldn't be as valuable as an MCSE, as the Canadian Gov't hasn't embraced linux yet.
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)
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.
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)
really? what you point to is still on RHEL 4.1 while centos is already at 4.2 and I have never had a problem like you described.
Maybe back in the 3.x series they were lagging, but they have a crapload of people working on it now as well as their own yum update repository instead of pointing at redhat's.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?
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
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