Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Sales Surge
head_dunce writes "Red Hat has reported earnings from its third quarter, and it did quite a bit better than expected. Even with the movement within the business by Oracle and SuSE/Microsoft, Red Hat came out quite a bit ahead. TheStreet.com reports on the company's $29.6 Million dollars windfall, and some of the tough times the company has had in the past year. From the article: 'CFO Charlie Peters said on a conference call with analysts that the company is "cautiously optimistic that competitive efforts by some of the largest technology companies in the world are actually expanding our opportunity."'"
It seems to me that a company concetrating on R&D and marketing is one which is healthy. The (dis)organisation I work for seem to have got that one arse about face!
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
A) RMS/GNU will not likely complain about Red Hat not living up to the spirit of the GPL because they do. The GPL is about access and redistribution of source code, all Red Hat's contributions to linux are open source, everyone has access and can change and redistribute the code. Your confusing Red Hat's network and personell resources people pay for to provide updates, installation support, and training with the source code coming out of Red Hat and available under the GPL.
B) While anyone can setup a business to deliver Red Hat's updates at a lower price, i.e. Oracle, its not likely that most Red Hat customers will be foolish enough to fall for fake open source proponents to provide support to the open source solutions their businesses depend on. Oracle and Microsoft are not a threat to Red Hat because they are obviously against open source and contrary to supporting it would actually like to stamp it out when it appears threatening to their primary business models.
C) Rather than Red Hat being forced into including proprietary software in their code base its more likely that customers will demand that other vendors support Red Hat by either developing and testing their proprietary products on Red Hat or by open sourcing their proprietary product so the community can provide the value of open source developement to the customer and the customer's vendors.
And either way, arguing that costs of developing linux and its components outstrips any possible revenues is a weak arguement considering linux came from $0 revenue to a serious competitor now generating billions in revenue. Yes I said billions. Red Hat is a small part of the linux market, there are several other vendors, IBM, Dell, HP, Novell, etc. who are making hundreds of millions off linux as well. Server hardware sales of linux based machines alone is over $1.5 billion a year.
RedHat has a release plan, and they won't deviate from it. In any case, RHEL 5 is already in advanced beta stage.
I really don't know what you mean about 2.6.9-EL getting in the way. True, it does use mostly 2.6.9 API/ABI, but not strictly (as anyone how tried to compile some external kernel modules, like ieee80211 and ipw2200 have found out), and also contain lots of updates. The only external driver I use is ipw2200, and that only because I wanted monitor mode. And, since I was already recompiling it, I went the upgrade path as well.
Many people see 2.6.9 and think: "OLD!". That is really not the case. Using the latests version on any production server is very dangerous. In any case, "STABLE" beats "NEW" every time in my book.
Lastly, please remember it is 2.6.9-EL, and not 2.6.9. They are very different beasts.
Please read "speaks backport".
morcego
There is about 50,000 of us running RHEL inside IBM.
+1 over here, unrelated to IBM. It really is very good product. With DAG rpm repo, it makes beautiful option for mass market, too. I have no idea how nobody (big PC sellers I mean) came up with that one yet.
Another one of the unique abilities of FOSS is the fact that it allows you to rely on the work of others. Rather than screwing around with Linux From Scratch (which is an amusing thing to do once as a hobbyist, not a serious business solution) it's perfectly possible to chose another Linux vendor with a better product pricing model... say Canonical with Ubuntu. If they're more attached to the Red Hat model than they are to decent external support, something like CentOS might be appropriate. There's no need for people to be hand-rolling their own distros.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.