Red Hat Support Continues To Flourish

ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"

Comments

Not Optional

[mr_da3m0n]

Yeah, nevermind the fact that support is not optional with Red Hat products. At all. The update service requires a subscription. So while the software itself is free as in beer, you end up paying a "license" in the form a subscription to get patches, or anything else from Red Hat to make it useable.

So the fact that people who use the software keep buying support for it is not that impressive. Granted, they could run CentOS if they wanted, but management likes support, and it is not that hard to picture a pointy haired boss refusing to run anything else than Red Hat either.

I don't buy it.

[BitZtream]

I know a lot of people who use Linux in production environments and I've not come across a single person who pays anyone for support.

I hate when names are pluralized to mean a group

[randoms]

I'm curious, what are the "MicrosoftS" and "OracleS" that the OP is referring to? AFAIK there is only one of each of those companies.

By the numbers

[westlake]

Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year.

What are the numbers for services from Microsoft and Oracle?