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In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue

head_dunce writes "Now that Red Hat has officially posted more than a billion dollars in revenue, ($1.13 billion to be exact), the company's PR department sent this funny list of quotes predicting doom. For instance, 'We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market but I really don't think in the commercial market we'll see it in any significant way.' Bill Gates, 2001."

227 comments

  1. Red Hat? by itsmilesdavis · · Score: 5, Funny

    More like Green Hat! WOOOOO!

    1. Re:Red Hat? by Nin10doman · · Score: 2

      Or maybe...Black Hat? Black ink is used for positive numbers in accounting--that's why the big shopping day in the US is called "Black Friday."

    2. Re:Red Hat? by SJHillman · · Score: 1

      Wasn't always that way
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Origin_of_the_term

      It's a good thing US money is still mostly green (unlike other countries that use a variety of colors for different bills) or else it might be confused with gay hat pride.

    3. Re:Red Hat? by Ihmhi · · Score: 2

      If Red Hat had a sense of humor, they would make a new promotional video using a certain ABBA song.

      ~funky bass line~
      [Morgan Freeman]: In 2001 Bill Gates said Linux won't be in the commercial market in [touch of sarcasm] "any significant way".
      [ABBA]: Money money money mooooooooooneeeeeeeeeeey~
      [Morgan Freeman]: I don't know about you...
      [ABBA]: Mooooooooneeeeeeyy! Money money money moooonnneeeeeeeeey~
      [Morgan Freeman]: But I'd call 1 billion dollars of revenue pretty signficant.
      [ABBA]: Mooooooooooooneyy!
      [Morgan Freeman]: Make the smart choice. Make the significant choice. Red Hat.

    4. Re:Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I like the O'Jays tune better. It works just as well.

      But you know what, $1B aint what it used to be. Call me when they get to $10B.

    5. Re:Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      lame. pretty much lame. I wish I hadn't read this lame comment.

    6. Re:Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, that's a song by The O'Jays that you're referencing, "For the Love of Money" (also significantly covered by Bulletboys). But, yes, such a promotional video would be pretty sweet.

    7. Re:Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not afraid of homosexuals, just annoyed by them.

    8. Re:Red Hat? by Larryish · · Score: 1
    9. Re:Red Hat? by iamhassi · · Score: 2

      But you know what, $1B aint what it used to be. Call me when they get to $10B.

      that's for sure.

      Congrat Redhat! You're beating Microsoft.... in 1989

      Microsoft reached a billion in 1990. And that's back when it was a different world, there were no (very few) hard drives, no (very few) "laptops", no smartphones, no (well, almost no) internet, and very few people owned a PC. Reaching a billion considering all those factors against them is amazing.

      Now Microsoft is up to 70 billion

      A billion is a great first step and something to be proud of, but I'd say it's still waaay too early to be saying "I TOLD U SO!" You've been out since 1994, reaching 1 billion after 18 years is... well, expected.

      --
      my karma will be here long after I'm gone
    10. Re:Red Hat? by ilguido · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And that's back when it was a different world, there were no (very few) hard drives, no (very few) "laptops", no smartphones, no (well, almost no) internet, and very few people owned a PC. Reaching a billion considering all those factors against them is amazing.

      Do you mean "back when it was easy to start a monopoly"?

    11. Re:Red Hat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      There is a limit on how one can earn in fair way.

    12. Re:Red Hat? by crutchy · · Score: 1

      more like borophil! no i do not want to make out with you

  2. Good for them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Redhat contributes a TON to open source projects, and a lot of the time I find their online documentation to be the best available. I am very glad they're doing well.

    1. Re:Good for them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's good to see Red Hat suceed. Red Hat 9 is the first Linux distro up to the task, that enabled me to break from the M$ windoz lockin. I've never looked back, thankfully!

  3. "I saw it on the internet" - Julius Caesar by Lyrata · · Score: 1

    Was that Bill Gates quote from 2001, or 1999, as a Google search suggests? I'm a little wary about its authenticity when I see people, especially on /., think that he actually said "640k is enough for anybody" when that is definitely not the case.

    Maybe I should use Bing! ;)

    --
    50,000 characters used to live here.
    1. Re:"I saw it on the internet" - Julius Caesar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, he probably did say it in all likelihood, even if nobody who was there will fess up to it.

      But the context is important. When deciding the memory split between RAM and BIOS/firmware, of the 1024K addressable memory in the 808x, 640K for RAM was enough.

      Compared to the competition at the time, e.g. Apple ][s and Commodore 64s that had 64K or 128K max, 640K was a lot of memory.

    2. Re:"I saw it on the internet" - Julius Caesar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "History is written by the conquerors"

      Just because Bill says he didn't say it doesn't mean he wasn't lying.

    3. Re:"I saw it on the internet" - Julius Caesar by Barbara,+not+Barbie · · Score: 1
      He *did* say in a book that between 1.5 and 2 meg was more than enough (LIM, EMS, various dos extenders).

      Ironically, it's possible for DOS programs on a 386 to address up to 4 gigabytes per process using unreal mode.

      --
      Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
    4. Re:"I saw it on the internet" - Julius Caesar by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see u use multiple user accts on slashdot (u troll) http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2764185&cid=39570265

  4. More by headhot · · Score: 1

    I wonder how much more they would have made if Oracle didn't rip them off. I dont count CentOS though. The vast majority of people using CentOS either can't afford Redhat or will move up when they can.

    1. Re:More by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oracle didn't "rip them off". You can't tout the benefits of open source software and then claim you got ripped off when someone uses your source code.

    2. Re:More by 0racle · · Score: 1

      Does anyone other then the most diehard Oracle customers even use Unbreakable Linux? I doubt Oracle's offering has had much effect on Red Hat's sales.

      --
      "I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
    3. Re:More by QuantumRiff · · Score: 1

      I really wish Redhat had some much cheaper, "updates only" version of their software.. When I worked in Education, we had a version that was $50/year.. I would love something like that for my own personal use.. and maybe a $100/y version for companies.. You know.. Like Oracle Does with their clone of redhat..

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    4. Re:More by Hatta · · Score: 1

      Isn't the point of Red Hat the support they provide? If you're not buying the support, why run Red Hat at all? Debian can do anything Red Hat can, and it's completely free.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    5. Re:More by Red+Storm · · Score: 5, Interesting

      While technically true, this argument does fall apart when a company such as Oracle rebrands RHEL into OEL, then goes on the offensive against RHEL/Red Hat when they don't have much of a team of developers to continue developing OEL should the hypothetical, but very unlikely, situation of Red Hat going away. In a situation such as that it's kind of like Oracle is biting the hand that feeds it.... CentOS on the other hand rebrands RHEL, but does not try to present themselves as the main proprietor of the distribution. In addition the CentOS community does try to push bug reports upstream when possible.

      --
      ---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
    6. Re:More by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Use Fedora. http://fedoraproject.org/

    7. Re:More by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I really wish Redhat had some much cheaper, "updates only" version of their software..

      Your requirement appears to be fulfilled by CentOS, or possibly Scientific Linux - what's wrong with these options?

    8. Re:More by 1s44c · · Score: 1

      I wonder how much more they would have made if Oracle didn't rip them off. I dont count CentOS though. The vast majority of people using CentOS either can't afford Redhat or will move up when they can.

      Or don't need the redhat support, or keep redhat on one machine for support and use CentOS on the other 3000 servers.

      CentOS to RHEL isn't a move up, it's binary compatible sameness except for a little artwork.

    9. Re:More by pak9rabid · · Score: 1

      !!Anecdotal Disclaimer!!

      We're by no means a "diehard Oracle customer" (in fact, I can't stand Oracle), but we do use OEL for our Oracle database nodes, if for no other reason than to avoid a finger-pointing circle-jerk when Oracle determines a problem lies with the underlaying OS.

    10. Re:More by pak9rabid · · Score: 1

      I really wish Redhat had some much cheaper, "updates only" version of their software...

      Assuming you're not in need of software support, such a distribution does exist, it's called CentOS.

    11. Re:More by pak9rabid · · Score: 3, Informative

      Isn't the point of Red Hat the support they provide? If you're not buying the support, why run Red Hat at all? Debian can do anything Red Hat can, and it's completely free.

      There are cases when you need to run a RHEL-compatible system, but don't want/need the expensive support contract from Red Hat (like when you have to have support for expensive, enterprise-level software where the vendor only supplies drivers in the form of a RHEL-compatible RPM). This is why projects such as CentOS exist.

    12. Re:More by jd2112 · · Score: 1

      Does anyone other then the most diehard Oracle customers even use Unbreakable Linux? I doubt Oracle's offering has had much effect on Red Hat's sales.

      Actually a fairly high percentage do, because Oracle licensing makes it MUCH more expensive on other OSes particularly on visualized environments.

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
    13. Re:More by neurovish · · Score: 1

      There is an "updates only" version, it is $350 / yr for a 2 socket server. Until about a year ago, this was the basic subscription that included web/email support.

    14. Re:More by xkahn · · Score: 1

      I really wish Redhat had some much cheaper, "updates only" version of their software.. When I worked in Education, we had a version that was $50/year.. I would love something like that for my own personal use.. and maybe a $100/y version for companies..

      Actually, this exists! It's $99 and includes "Eclipse, Eclipse Tooling, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss SOA Platform, JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Operations Network, and one entitlement to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with built-in development tools, and Red Hat Network Access for development purposes."

      https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/developers/

      the license is not for production machines though.

      Also note that you can get free copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux if you are an ISV developing software for it:

      http://www.redhat.com/partners/become/isv/

      --
      This .sig is left blank.
    15. Re:More by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Debian's Apt/DPKG system can convert RPMs, and I believe the converter is called "alien". So I've never needed any RPM based distribution. I've fallen in love with the Debian APT repository system, very inuitive and capable.

    16. Re:More by cthulhu11 · · Score: 1

      Red Hat's support contracts aren't expensive as such things go, but their excuses are unique when problems are reported. Sun might have filed an internal bug report. My experience with RH has mostly fallen into two classes: 1) Go complain to whoever wrote whatever, it wasn't us 2) We can't fix that because it's "upstream" and it would (ominous music) Fork The Distribution #2 is hilarious because RH is their own upstream. Never have I seen evidence from a customer perspective of the claim that RH pours massive resources into development, and first-level support seems to be incompetently offshored.

    17. Re:More by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Shhh!! You're encouraging the finger-pointing circle-jerk!

    18. Re:More by KugelKurt · · Score: 1

      While technically true, this argument does fall apart when a company such as Oracle rebrands RHEL into OEL, then goes on the offensive against RHEL/Red Hat when they don't have much of a team of developers to continue developing OEL

      Um, you're wrong on this one. Yes, Oracle Linux is just rebranded RHEL, but overall Oracle has lots of capable developers. Orcale, for example, is a larger contributor to Xorg than Red Hat: https://vignatti.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/x-census-for-1-10/
      btrfs is also mostly done by Oracle. Oracle could also easily transfer Solaris developers to Linux.

    19. Re:More by QuantumRiff · · Score: 1

      I use CentOS constantly, and love it.. However, I would like to kick back some 'love' in the form of money to Redhat to thank them for their hard work. (or else CentOS would not exist)..

      However, justifying the cost of RHEL is very hard for us.. if it was a cheap $50 updates only version, I would move our dozens of servers to it..

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
  5. In your face? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Since when did Jesse Cox start using Linux?

  6. A Billion Thanks to the Open Source Community from by GioMac · · Score: 5, Informative
    --
    "It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
  7. Red Hat also announced some donations by Red+Storm · · Score: 5, Informative

    Red Hat also announced that they will be donating $100,000 to each of the following organizations; Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center and UNICEF Innovation Labs. http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/A-billion-thanks-to-the-open-source-community-from-Red-Hat

    --
    ---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
    1. Re:Red Hat also announced some donations by Logic+and+Reason · · Score: 2, Informative

      The way I read that announcement, Red Hat is donating $100,000 total, divided in some unspecified way among those four beneficiaries. Still a nice gesture, though.

    2. Re:Red Hat also announced some donations by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Why are they giving anything to the SFLC, given how hostile the FSF has been to them: RMS doesn't consider them a company that sells 'free software'. They should instead bankroll OSI, and some of the projects out there, like KDE, GNOME, GNUSTEP and so on.

  8. Congrats by santax · · Score: 5, Funny

    But, does it run linux?

  9. Honestly, now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... when Bill Gates made that comment, which I don't have trouble believing he might have at some point, it was a different era.

    There's no comparison between the ease of use between many of today's Linux distros and what was available around that time. Clearly the open source community has made great strides in hardware support, software efficiency, and overall user-friendliness.

    C'mon, Slashdot. We don't have to add a few additional lines of bashing to posts to make them interesting. Red Hat earning over 1 Billion in revenue is sensational enough!

    1. Re:Honestly, now... by Sique · · Score: 2

      When Bill Gates made that comment, Linux was already the most deployed HTTP server plattform, in our datacenter there were lots of customers running large deployments of 1 HU linux servers and Linux was encroaching the embedded market with lots of appliances being built on top of a linux base installation.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    2. Re:Honestly, now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I clearly recall the "640K will be enough for anyone" jokes from the era of the first Rube Goldberg extended/expanded memory kludges. That was circa 1985 - 1989, before Linux was around. In fact, it was in The Age Before Windows.

      Now I do not remember the differences between expanded memory and extended memory, but at the time those differences were very significant.

    3. Re:Honestly, now... by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Now I do not remember the differences between expanded memory and extended memory, but at the time those differences were very significant.

      Extended memory is memory at an address beyond the 1 megabyte boundry.
      Expanded memory is memory accessed through a window (located somewhere in the area between 640K and 1M) and bank switching.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    4. Re:Honestly, now... by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 1

      That was also before MS had a lot of success in the server space. In 2001 MS went from 42->49% of the server space: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-959049.html, in 2011 it was 73.9%. Linux gained marketshare but so did windows and they went from a minority share to a large majority share. As much of a flop as Vista was people forget that MS revenue has gone crazy mostly because they've started to dominate serverland.

  10. Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by JoeMerchant · · Score: 0

    1% of Apple:

    http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/aapl/financials

    and, total revenue = 1/7th of Microsoft's 2010-2011 growth:

    http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/msft/financials

    I love Linux (lowercase l), and RedHat does good things - worthy of being a going-growing concern. "Winning the war", they are not.

    1. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by nine-times · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why do they need to "win the war"? We don't need software monoculture. We need interoperability. Redhat is successful and doing well in a market where others are also doing well.

    2. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Omnifarious · · Score: 1

      Yeah, it's easy to make a lot of money when you trade the freedom of your users for cash in your pocket.

    3. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      Well It isn't the same war.
      Red Hat has distance itself from its consumer business. So they are not competing with Apple who has distance itself from its Server Business.

      For Microsoft how much of their business is in B2B sales. That would probably give a closer number.

      I like Apple, I like Linux and I like Microsoft (Lately). They seem to fill different Niches.

      Apple - Has gotten really strong on Mobile. While I have been dishearten with OS X and Macs Apples mobile Offerings are still top of the industry.
      Microsoft - They finally got Windows 7 to do what they promised us for Windows 95. And I find it a good Desktop OS, even better then Macs, or Linux.
      Linux - If I have a back end server. I want it to be a Linux server. Linux can be stripped down to the basics and do what it needs to do and do it well without all the touch and freely stuff Microsoft gives us.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    4. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Red+Storm · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I love Linux (lowercase l), and RedHat does good things - worthy of being a going-growing concern. "Winning the war", they are not.

      Red Hat has a poster in almost every office quoting Ghandi:
      First they ignore You
      Then they laugh at you
      They they fight you
      Then you win.

      That quote permeates most of Red Hat Culture.

      --
      ---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
    5. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by scubamage · · Score: 1

      I think they mean winning the war on perception. Plus, their business model is markedly different. Apple is a hardware vendor (with some software thrown in) dedicated to consumer grade equipment (mac pro being the exception, and the now defunct xserve line). Microsoft is like GE where they have their hands in 80 million different pies, consumer and enterprise. Red Hat essentially offers support and maintains an extremely stable distribution (with a ton of kernel development thrown in) - and they're only in the enterprise market - and they're growing. I'm pretty sure that their install base across the world is higher than both OSX and and Windows in their chosen market (though the latest releases from windows do have some nice teeth).

    6. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First they ignore you
      Then they laugh at you
      They they fight you
      Then you win.

        -- Gandhi

      First they march you through hundreds of miles of jungle without food or water
      Then they shoot you
      They they disembowel you
      Then you lose.

        -- Gandhi, had the Japs won WW2

    7. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by CharlyFoxtrot · · Score: 1

      How many other failed Linux distros had the same poster hanging in their offices ? It's great to hear Red Hat is doing well for themselves but it's not like there's a vibrant market out there for Linux. Few companies are left standing, and most of those are struggling, Novell, Mandriva, ... Even the successful Red Hat at 1 billion in revenue is making a 14th of what Sun was doing just before they were acquired. In that sense Gates was right: Linux hasn't turned out to be the competitor that would sweep everything away in its path like optimists at the time predicted. Instead there's one company left standing enjoying moderate success, nothing Microsoft has to worry about.

      --
      If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
    8. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by powerlinekid · · Score: 1

      I believe Linux has more "market share" on mobile than Apple at this point.

      --

      can't sleep slashdot will eat me
    9. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by 1s44c · · Score: 1

      ..."Soaking the most cash from the consumer", they are not...

      If you want a server you can spend a pile of cash on windows and it will run ok-ish if you take a lot of care setting it up or you can get better security, performance, and flexibility without the lock-in and at a lower cost from RedHat.

      Looks like RedHat isn't winning the war, they have already won it. The only thing they are not so good at it is using that leverage to collect massive amounts of cash from their customers and from people who are not their customers via dodgy bulk licensing deals.

    10. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Good points. Within the market segment Red Hat serves, there is Red Hat, and IBM. Once there was also Hewlett-Packard, Wang, DEC, and a few others, but they fell by the wayside. I think mostly for failing to have the corporate vision to jump on a Linux horse when their own could no longer keep up the pace.

      I suppose Oracle should also be included as an enterprise service provider. Maybe. They sell into that market, but their business model is so different from the others (a little heavy on the patent lawyer division, etc) that I'm not sure whether they are competitive or simply bottom feeding off companies that don't know how to swim in the new waters.

    11. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm an ass

      -- Anonymous Coward, purely hypothetically if things went completely different than they did.

    12. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by DesScorp · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That quote permeates most of Red Hat Culture.

      Know what else permeates most of Red Hat culture? Reality. They realized years ago that making it easy for people to get your product for free isn't going to make you much money. Thus, no binaries for non-paying customers. You've gotta be willing to compile everything from source yourself. We're making a big deal about a "billion dollar open source company" here, when Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company. They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL. Giving your product away, ready made, is folly if you actually want to make big money (unless you can make money by advertising, a'la Google and Facebook... but operating systems don't work that way).

      How many other billion dollar open source companies are there?

      --
      Life is hard, and the world is cruel
    13. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Informative

      Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company.
        They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL.

      Um, yes it does.

      The source code for all their stuff is available for free here: http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/.

      They don't have to do that. They are only obligated to provide the source on request for a reasonable copying fee to people to whom they distribute binaries to. Instead, they make it freely available to anyone who wants it, without charging a cent for the bandwidth.

      Speaking of cents, you can get CentOS, which is identical to RHEL minus the branding entirely for free because RedHat make the sources available freely. Also, redhat make the sources avaialble for non GPL software which they simply don't have to do.

      So, the claim that they are as proprietary as possible is simply false.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    14. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, it's easy to make a lot of money when you a product users want to buy.

    15. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      This isn't Ubuntu.

      I do laugh at Linux desktop users who think they are running a more stable, better quality, and desktop friendly OS when they run an update and their video drivers are toasted. The desktop distros are not that great as a single update can hose your system and not work with everything. Which is why Joe Six pack prefers IOS. ... however server ones are much morestable and cheaper than Windows. Redhat is one of those that is industrial enterprise tested. It is made for servers and not desktop users. Think racks of servers at ISPs for customers who need a cheap hosting solution with free development tools and great uptime?

      Redhat is an enterprise player and is growing very nicely. Apple's growth is coming to an end as all the rich people have their expensive products and the rest can't afford them or already have one.

    16. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except Linux will never "win"

    17. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      It wavers back and forth.
      But if you compare Apple having only a small subset of products it is more impressive.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    18. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >They don't have to do that. They are only obligated to provide the source on request for a reasonable copying fee to people to whom they distribute binaries to. Instead, they make it freely available to anyone who wants it, without charging a cent for the bandwidth.

      I think you need to read the GPL more closely.

      http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

      3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

              a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
              b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

      I omitted (c) as it is not an option for RedHat. They may either give the source code away to their customers UP FRONT, or they may give it away to EVERYONE (customers and non-customers) for 3 years at cost. Of course, they are complying with (a) for their customers because they give them the same access to the source as they do to the binaries, so it isn't a problem. Don't claim they are going above and beyond, though, as they are not (internet distribution does not fulfill (b)*, but is obviously still permissible).

      * - Until you can physically hand me an FTP or HTTP session, it is not "physically performing source distribution" nor is it on a "medium" (an intervening substance, as air, through which a force acts or an effect is produced [dictionary.com]).

    19. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by JoeMerchant · · Score: 1

      Apple's growth is coming to an end as all the rich people have their expensive products and the rest can't afford them or already have one.

      I'm not so sure, the Applesauce for brains people I know upgrade their phones every other cycle, buy one of every iPad that comes out, and update their laptops about every 3 years.

    20. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Red Hat has a poster in almost every office quoting Ghandi:
      First they ignore You
      Then they laugh at you
      They they fight you
      Then you win.

      Man, you think they would have double checked that quote before putting it on a poster. Especially one in every office.

    21. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by jdogalt · · Score: 1

      >>Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company.
      >> They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL.

      > Um, yes it does.

      Actually, and I speak from a highly relevent perspective here, I'd like to point out that you are both wrong. RedHat is neither black nor white on this issue. They surf the grey area profitably. But I'll give them credit for surfing the gray, mostly on toward the better side. Yes, they do actually go a long way (in many ways) beyond what the GPL requires. And lots of people appreciate that. But both they and CentOS, will choose to take gray paths that inhibit the easy full harnessing of the source code in ideal form, without going through a path that requires one of those organizations to both have their logo all over the distro, and go through their compilation and distribution servers as part of your experience with the 'open source code distribution'. I've personally spent months of my own unemployed time trying to remedy this situation, such that anyone can easily leverage the nice srpms that RH provides, without having to deal with either CentOS or RedHat's logos and compilation servers (really, a $350 modern netbook can compile all of *EL-6.X in about a week, not something that demands dependence on an external corporation's servers).

      Anyway, props to RH for getting their share of the $$ pie. And seemingly in less insidious ways than advertising companies have leveraged open source software to get their massive share of the $$ pie.

    22. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is how it usually works:

      First they ignore You
      Then they laugh at you
      They they fight you
      Then they crush you.

    23. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And then there is Fedora. And all the developers they hire FULL TIME to work on open source software

    24. Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not really.

      Redhat has improved tremendously, but your statement is only even partly true if you forget about Redhat's history.

      Redhat purchased an X server for a mobile ATI chip in the 90s. They refused to open it up so they could have a competitive advantage. That is very proprietary company-esq.

      Redhat refused to accept a patch (Hans wrote extensively on this issue) for ReiserFS that would address a data corruption issue. They did not care if their customers lost their data. That goes beyond the crap most proprietary companies do, and shows Redhat's contempt for their own user base.

      Redhat has an interesting patch policy where they don't break out the patches to their proprietary kernels for the stated reason that they want it to be harder for other distributions to figure out what they are doing. Very proprietary.

      Redhat wants to make an entire new kernel subsystem because they don't know how to create an initramfs properly, and their strong NIH (not invented here) proprietary attitude prevents them from adopting the perfectly good userspace solution developed by Debian. NIH is apparently also why Redhat had such a horrible, primitive, package manager for the last decade. That, and they don't seem to give a fuck about their customers (see data corruption ReiserFS comment).

      Redhat profits by making deals with other proprietary companies to only support Redhat. This is completely a proprietary company operational tactic. Anybody who has used Debian knows that even a decade ago, it was technologically superior to anything Redhat has ever released up to today-- hell, you can't even upgrade Redhat?!!!! They recommend a clean install, and migrate your config WTF?!!! even Windows does better than that. The ONLY reason the college where I work runs ANY Redhat is because of these agreements with other proprietary companies that FORCE us to use Redhat for these few systems running other proprietary software.

      Redhat is a proprietary company that sometimes, like Apple, gives a little back. It is nice that the amount they give back has increased rather than decreased over the years, but in spite of their contributions, they still operate as a proprietary company.

  11. Awesome.. but some perspective by rgbrenner · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's great that RH finally passed that mark... that's on top of the good news they've been announcing for the past few years.. from their revenue growth through the recession (thanks to the subscription model), to their entry into the fortune 500.

    But does anyone here think Bill Gates or Microsoft stays awake worried about RH? They pulled in 72x more revenue, 159x more profits, and have 63x more cash on hand (50.69b vs 808m) than Red Hat. Microsoft even has a better profit margin than RH (32.5% vs 13.3%).

    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft
    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=RHT+Key+Statistics

    1. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ... They pulled in 72x more revenue, 159x more profits ...

      Thats just two orders of magnitude -- which is little when you assume exponential change (which one should here -- or at least prefer it over the assumption of linear change).

    2. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by kungfugleek · · Score: 2

      And at one point, IBM was that much bigger than Microsoft.

    3. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by rgbrenner · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If Microsoft stopped growing today.. and RH kept growing at the rate they did last year (23% revenue growth)... it will be 21 years before they reach Microsoft's size.

      I wouldn't call that "little"... 20 years is an eternity in software.

    4. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by rgbrenner · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And I assume by posting that, you didn't know that IBM is 47% larger (by revenue) than Microsoft?

      http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=IBM+Key+Statistics
      http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft

    5. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by Baloroth · · Score: 1

      And? 47% is pretty damned close if they used to differ by ~7200% percent.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    6. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How much time Apple needed to come back from the verge of death?

    7. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by wwbbs · · Score: 2

      MS is a Mature Company. They are having a hell of time milking their Cash Cows right now. MS Office and MS Server both have significantly declining sales. Everything else they have touched has been a loss leader (xbox, bing, win mobile etc) This is an attempt to capture market share before falling completely into the toilet. Red Hat inc on the other hand has grown from the ether into a profitable company despite a product portfolio significantly smaller than M$. Where Red Hat Shines is the offer the best of the best when it comes to support of their software. Enterprise Red Hat Linux is significantly cheaper when you factor in the level of support you get. Do not forget that even companies as large as IBM outsource or licence Enterprise Red Hat Linux as it feels a niche market that if AIX were to support it would cause a significant profit decline based on AIX market share. I personally have paid for many Domino/Lotus Notes server's installation/migrations from Windows to RedHat as it far more cost effective based on 5-7year hardware cycles. (Which in some government agencies is a short life span. I've seen RS/6000 and IBM PL300's have uptime's measured in thousands of days and life cycles approaching 15years)

    8. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by rgbrenner · · Score: 1

      I agree with much of what you posted.. but even in 1990, when Microsoft passed $1B in revenue, they had a profit margin 2x of RH: 337 million vs 144 million
      http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/26/business/microsoft-net-increases-76.2.html

    9. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by rgbrenner · · Score: 1

      Ack.. that should be 279 million (MS 1990 profit) vs 144 million (RH)

    10. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree with much of what you posted.. but even in 1990, when Microsoft passed $1B in revenue, they had a profit margin 2x of RH: 337 million vs 144 million
      http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/26/business/microsoft-net-increases-76.2.html

      Of course, adjusted for inflation, that was almost $2B in 2012 dollars, so MS hit it even earlier than that (mid 80's).

    11. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by buchanmilne · · Score: 1

      But does anyone here think Bill Gates or Microsoft stays awake worried about RH? They pulled in 72x more revenue, 159x more profits, and have 63x more cash on hand (50.69b vs 808m) than Red Hat. Microsoft even has a better profit margin than RH (32.5% vs 13.3%).

      http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft
      http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=RHT+Key+Statistics

      But, if RH takes all of MSs market share in areas they compete in, RH will still have lower revenues/profit in that area than MS.

      Because the customer is saving.

      Revenue comparison is irrelevant here, revenue loss (including potential) by MS and market share are more relevant.

      By their actions (adopting open source, when 5 years ago they were attacking it) shows they are worried enough to try and fight it now.

    12. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by TheDarkener · · Score: 0

      Funny how Redhat, with 1/72 revenue of Microsoft, still manages to make a better product... *smirk*

      --
      It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
    13. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by s.petry · · Score: 1

      Software pricing back in 1990 was drastically different than it is now. It was around DOS 4.0 where we started to see competition for DOS. When competition was high prices started to drop. DOS 3.0 was over $250.00, and by DOS 6 the prices were down to $80.00. Microsoft had 0 competition for Windows, which was their cash cow. The competition on DOS was the biggest driving factor for the push to Windows 95, it removed the ability to compete for the low level space in DOS.

      I'm not Microsoft bashing, as I normally would be. IBM sold Lotus 123 for around 500.00 for the same reason. WordPerfect was in the couple hundred dollar range. The software market changes rapidly, which makes for huge bubbles in profits. New stuff generally costs 10 times what it will cost in a year once some competition comes out.

      The OS market bubble popped in the mid 1990s, so no matter what the OS being released there will be no company that can make the profit margins that Microsoft, IBM, Coral, etc.. were making in the early 1990s.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    14. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by unixisc · · Score: 1

      What if MS started shrinking - as in losing desktop marketshare to Apple, as a result of Windows 8? Will it still take 21 years for RHEL to catch up? Ignoring other alternatives, such as Debian, FreeBSD, et al?

    15. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by rgbrenner · · Score: 1

      What if MS disappears tomorrow? Wow.. then RH would be larger overnight!

      In the time RH has grown from 100 million to 1 billion in revenue, MS has grown from 23 billion to 70 billion. There's no indication that RH will ever catch up to MS, or that MS will start rapidly shrinking.

      And Windows 8? MS has already say it will be similar to Vista, in that they are going to take some big risks to see what works for Windows 9. So they aren't really expecting it to be as popular as their previous releases. Besides, they have had bad releases before, and it has not destroyed the company: ME and Vista, for example. Because of their support policy, people are not forced to upgrade to the latest release.. so if people want to skip a release they can.

    16. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Well, Windows 8 will be very different from Vista in one major way - this time, you have a new platform - Windows on ARM - which doesn't run your legacy Wintel apps. There was no Vista on ARM coming out in the same way that there is Windows 8 on ARM.

      Guess what this means? When Windows 8 is out, there will be some Windows products that will run these legacy apps (the ones based on x64 offerings from either Intel or AMD) and some that don't (the ones based on ARM) The only reason people buy anything Windows is to run Windows a.k.a. Wintel apps. Once they find out that there exist Windows products that won't run those things, the brand recognition of Windows is irrepairably damaged. After all, the average Bill and Suzy does not know x86 from ARM, and doesn't care: all s/he wants is to run the programs s/he has discs for on the new device. Once s/he finds out s/he can't, you'll have a stampede of customers wanting to return those things.

      Once they go through this experience, the trust in Windows will never be the same again. Today, when you see something that says Windows, you know that it will run Wintel apps. Yeah, there were the RISC NT workstations in the late 90s, but aside from being few, the only people who bought them were those who sought them out - the same sort of people who bought Silicon Graphics Indys, or Sun SparcStations and so on. But this time, Windows on ARM, unlike Windows on Alpha or Windows on MIPS, will be available in places like Frys, Micro Center, and all sorts of retail stores. Once people buy those things and get burnt, a lot of them will even bite the bullet and buy Macs - at least, they know that it will just work. Which had been true about MS, but not anymore. And by the time Windows 2000 was out, MS had killed the Windows/RISC platforms at least as far as customer facing went.

      That's what is the difference b/w past failures like ME and Vista, vs this one. Whatever the issues w/ ME and Vista, it was never that they broke compatibility and eroded the brand recognition of Windows. But w/ Windows on ARM, Windows 8 promises to do just that. People can stick to 7 or have downgrade rights, but the damage will have been done. And we're not even factoring in what the competition will do, and I'm not thinking Red Hat here. Apple could easily introduce a line to seize a good portion of marketshare, while even Google could work w/ PC vendors to bundle Chromium OS w/ a basic suite of software titles that would keep customers interested.

  12. Perhaps... by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps there is a billion dollars worth of revenue from the hobbyist and Student Market?

    What Red Hat did which was shift away from trying to compete on the Desktop Market (Microsoft bread and butter) and focus more on the Server Market where Microsoft while a major player has more of an equal footing. Where they had a lot of legacy Unix shops that wanted to get off Unix Platforms but still keep the Unixy goodness.

    In general most Novel Shops went to Windows, most Unix Shops went to Linux. By "most" meaning there are exceptions, and plenty of anecdotal stories. As moving to the other platform was much easier for the company.

    For new companies. They would split across Microsoft and Linux (With Red Hat offering enterprise level support) Some would go with Microsoft and Other with Linux...

    So in a competive market I am not supprised that Red Hat made money. They played smart business and they made money.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:Perhaps... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1) Make conjecture.

      2) Discuss conjecture, but provide no evidence.

      3) Define conjecture as confirmed.

  13. I'd imagine ... by Rambo+Tribble · · Score: 1

    ... King George III probably said that those rebellious colonists in America would never amount to anything, either. Freedom rules.

    1. Re:I'd imagine ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Supposedly George III wrote in his diary on July 4, 1776: "Nothing of interest happened today."

      Obviously there's no way he could have known what was going on across the ocean, but it's still amusing.

    2. Re:I'd imagine ... by DesScorp · · Score: 1

      ... King George III probably said that those rebellious colonists in America would never amount to anything, either. Freedom rules.

      Rules? Uh, no. Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle... still way bigger. Saying that open source or free software as a business model "rules" is like comparing Switzerland to the US or China. Yes, it's great that it's a very free country and has been independent for many centuries... but it doesn't "rule" anything.

      --
      Life is hard, and the world is cruel
    3. Re:I'd imagine ... by Rambo+Tribble · · Score: 2

      Apple, IBM and Oracle are all very dependent on open source. OS X wouldn't even exist without it. The open source movement is only a few decades old, yet it has transformed computing forever. The finance industry, as in the case of the NYSE, is dependent on it. That finance industry is far larger and more powerful than any nation. Just because open source doesn't stand as a single, monolithic entity doesn't mean it isn't a decisive force in the world today.

    4. Re:I'd imagine ... by colinrichardday · · Score: 1

      I've read that Louis XVI wrote much the same thing on July 14, 1789 (Bastille Day).

  14. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by tomhath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Did you post that from a tablet computer by chance?

  15. Umm by Psychotria · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To a large extent, Red Hat is cashing in on a much broader community effort that has developed Linux and sold it as a viable platform to software developers, says George Weiss, an analyst with the Gartner technology research firm. But Red had a hand in this. “Give credit to Red Hat for fashioning a business model that created value from subscription support,” he adds.

    Emphasis mine. I don't think that the success of Red Hat depended on Linux being a viable platform for software developers. Rather, it depended on Linux being a viable platform for servers (I'm not meaning to under-emphasise the desktop users, or the developers, here; all I'm trying to say is that the success of Red Hat probably has little to do with Linux being "developer friendly" and more to do with the server market [and all that entails]).

    1. Re:Umm by sunderland56 · · Score: 2

      The success of Red Hat does not depend on them selling anything at all. That $1 billion is for services and support - the product itself is free.

    2. Re:Umm by Psychotria · · Score: 1

      The success of Red Hat does not depend on them selling anything at all. That $1 billion is for services and support - the product itself is free.

      I bet you 5 gold pieces that I can split a hair finer than you! ;-)

    3. Re:Umm by Red+Storm · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not quite....

      Technically, Red Hat's "product" is a compiled copy the Linux kernel and associated Open Source Packages required to create a working operating system. Yes the source is free, and Red Hat does follow through on the GPL obligations, but on it's own the source is useless, you can't actually use it without you or someone else spending the time and effort to compile it first. Thus Red Hat is "selling" a compiled and packaged form of the associated source code, however it's sold in the form of a subscription which includes access to software updates and some level of support.

      --
      ---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
    4. Re:Umm by bmo · · Score: 1

      He's right though, and it's not splitting hairs.

      When you buy Server 2008, you buy a license and 5 CALs (minimum). For a grand. That's it. That's all you get.

      Support is completely separate with Microsoft, and have your credit card ready because it ain't cheap.

      --
      BMO

    5. Re:Umm by Kjella · · Score: 2

      I'm not sure there's a contradiction here, Red Hat obviously made their money on the server market as that was their specialization. But the reason they could specialize is that developers can pull Linux in the direction they want. You want it to run on embedded? Mobile? Tablets? Desktops? Servers? Supercomputers? On x86 or PowerPC or ARM or PDP-11? Linux has become its own gravity well, whatever you want to do you'd rather add that functionality to Linux than trying to roll your own thing. Ultimately that's the reason there was something for Red Hat to start packaging up, there's no chicken or egg situation here. Being developer friendly came first, useful as a server later.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    6. Re:Umm by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      Technically, Red Hat's "product" is a compiled copy the Linux kernel and associated Open Source Packages required to create a working operating system. Yes the source is free, and Red Hat does follow through on the GPL obligations, but on it's own the source is useless, you can't actually use it without you or someone else spending the time and effort to compile it first. Thus Red Hat is "selling" a compiled and packaged form of the associated source code, however it's sold in the form of a subscription which includes access to software updates and some level of support.

      So Red Hat's competing with CentOS, then? I mean, why pay for Red Hat binaries when I can get the equivalent by getting CentOS for free? And they're both built from the same sources.

      Hell, Oracle's Linux is based on Red Hat's as well...

      No, the compiled product is really not worth that much. The support though, is worth a lot, especially since Red Hat also charges for CentOS installs as part of its newer support agreements...

    7. Re:Umm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Servers are a viable platform for software developers.

      Even if you create a cool web app for your iPhone you will be connecting to a web server to host the data right?

    8. Re:Umm by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      I use Linux as a software developer platform.

      It will become more relevant in the coming years as desktop apps turn into HTML 5 apps. You need to host the data somewhere. I use WIndows 7 as my primary OS now but run php through a VM. Much less hassle than playing with databases and IIS on my desktop machine.

      True if all you do is Java swing apps and .net winforms it is not needed. Those days are coming to an end. Linux is a much better alternative to Windows on the server. I do admit it sucks goatballs on the desktop, but let the ishiny things of IOS take care of that market instead.

  16. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    Desktop Linux is slowly but steadily making progress and getting more polished every day. Who knows if at some point we pass the critical mark.

  17. How could they not be successful? by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a developer (on RHEL 5/6) in a company on the same size order as MS that deploys RH or the CentOS derivative on the high tens-of-thousands of nodes scale.

    Congratulations and all, but how could you not be successful when providing such a superior product to your competition. RHEL beats MS server variants in every way for ease of development (integrating dozens of nodes is a breeze, IA is consistent and well documented), cost, features, and support (we can call up RHEL developers at any time to request they investigate problems and push out fixes on timely schedules).

    They are a great company, and don't make you feel dirty for using their product.

    --
    while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
    1. Re:How could they not be successful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If only RHEL was in the same cost ball park. They're very nice about licensing (one entity within our org had a site license; RedHat went on record as saying, don't bother coming back for more licenses until you exceede your license by 10x) but even then, Microsoft gives us a better deal. Sure we're huge so we get very nice discounts, but at the end of the day it made it hard to explain to people why we had to pay for licenses.

    2. Re:How could they not be successful? by 1s44c · · Score: 2

      You are talking nonsense. Redhat don't even sell licenses.

      I've always found RHEL cheaper than windows as well as faster and more stable. Plus RHEL don't use support to push more product the way I've seen MS do. Got a problem? Any problem? Buy more domain controllers. Yeah right.

    3. Re:How could they not be successful? by ewieling · · Score: 0

      "Congratulations and all, but how could you not be successful when providing such a superior product to your competition."

      How? By being killed by MS. See: DESQview, Stacker, Mosaic.

      --
      I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
  18. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 1

    OK, how about it? Are they from industry leaders?

    --
    The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
  19. But... by MooMooFarm · · Score: 0

    At what cost?

  20. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by LandoCalrizzian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How about quotes from the same era about Linux on the desktop? Or quotes from every year since about how this year will be the long heralded Year Of Linux on the desktop?

    It started as media hype but this is the era of mobile computing and I would say that Linux has done extremely well in that market. Apple is still #1, Android is #2 but Microsoft is 4th when there is a huge gap between 2nd and 3rd. Android is still a consolation prize until they can start running neck and neck with the iPad and when that happens, you'll have more PR hype asking "Is this the year the [mainstream] desktop dies?" It's all part of the plan for Linux world dominance. Bow down to your root overlords!

  21. Interesting... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What I find impressive about Redhat is not Linux volume per se(woah, you mean that a world with a zillion cheap webservers wants an x86 unix for free? I never would have guessed); but that they've continued to sustain demand for paid offerings in the face of free-if-you-bring-your-own-expert stuff(which is unattractive at a small scale; but becomes economic if you are big enough) and various 'appliance-ized' Redhat clones put out by the vendors of the software designed to run on top of them(eg. Oracle's database + I can't believe it's not Redhat offering)...

    It seems totally unsurprising that much of the internet hosting going on today wouldn't even be economically possible if they were paying a tithe to Redmond, and it is similarly unsurprising that vendors of expensive applications would really rather that you pay for their software, not for the OS it happens to run on. Much more interesting that there is a place for Redhat in all this...

    1. Re:Interesting... by eric_herm · · Score: 1

      There is more than webservers. Let's take a bank, you need storage, database or assimilated server ( ldap, like 389ds, red hat project ), you may want to run a messaging for all your business software ( amqp, again, there is something ), you may use a application server ( like jboss, part of red hat ).

      You may want to have a certified os ( fips, selinux ), you may want certifications for the hardware. That's problem you can solve with hiring some expert, and that can be solved by taking something that already do it. Given that everybody I know basically say that finding skilled people is hard in IT, that's easy to see where it goes.

      For exemple, Debian is a nice os, stable, with lots of feature, and a diverse ecosystem of company to support it. I know lots of people using it, and having been a debian sysadmin, it is not hard to manage, but that's a tradeoff,, you cannot go to the vendor in case of big issues ( not that it happen often, but for some case even 1 problem a year is too much if you lose lots of money when it happen ) . Some company are too big to be addressed by smaller ones, some company prefer to have another company to talk ( for appliance for exemple ), etc.

      There is not 1 solution that can solve every case of "computer issues", contrary to what most people seems to believe, there is lots of different solutions, adapted to the different case, and both RHEL, Debian, Centos, etc do solve the same big problem on the server side, in a way that give flexibility to people, and enough room for a healthy competition ( if we except of course OEL ).

  22. $40 billion more to go by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If they earn $40 billion more next year, they could make the bottom of the Fortune 500 list.
    I won't argue with their success and I'm happy that they're happy, but in the grander scheme of things, they have a long way to go.

    1. Re:$40 billion more to go by 1s44c · · Score: 1

      If they earn $40 billion more next year, they could make the bottom of the Fortune 500 list.
      I won't argue with their success and I'm happy that they're happy, but in the grander scheme of things, they have a long way to go.

      Depends on what war we want them to win. MS are brilliant at extracting money from customers and even non-customers who buy computer hardware, that's not the kind of company I'd like to deal with as a customer.

  23. Great News! by scubamage · · Score: 2

    Congratulations Bob and Marc! To this day RHEL is probably my favorite distro (not trying to start a distro war), and I've been using RH it since apollo. They were cool guys then, and I can only imagine they've stayed the same.

    1. Re:Great News! by godrik · · Score: 1

      I've been using RH it since apollo.

      Wow, it has been a while! I did not even know they had computers at that time!

    2. Re:Great News! by scubamage · · Score: 1

      Of course we did! You haven't lived until you've compiled the kernel on an abacus!

    3. Re:Great News! by Reservoir+Penguin · · Score: 1

      Wow, I was not aware that abacuses are Turing complete. :)

      --
      US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
  24. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    For every media story proclaiming the "year of the linux desktop" there are half a dozen "linux on the desktop is dead" stories. Go ahead and try to prove me wrong, but you know that Linux on the desktop has been shat on by the industry press for at least a decade now and yet it has continued to grow.

  25. What's so ironic about Glyn Moody's quote? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From Red Hat's list of quotes:

    “Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion...” – Glyn Moody, 2010.

    From the end of the article:

    ... Red Hat is now the first (and only) $1 billion open source company ...

    So Moody's prediction is so far so good? Or are there several others encroaching on the billion dollar mark?

    I think this must be another case of people mocking what they read, rather than what the other person wrote. I see that a lot.

  26. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Everyone (except maybe the techie /. crowd) uses smartphones and tablets, not desktops, as their primary computing resource. Linux has won that battle.

  27. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Funny

    Progress like Gnome 3 and Unity?

  28. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Android is #1, iOS is #2. You have to be very careful of weasel words from Apple supporters: they'll make claims like "Apple is the largest single mobile vendor!", but of course all of the Android vendors put together still outnumber Apple. So Android market share is larger than iOS.

  29. Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of MS by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Two things:

    >> "'We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market but I really don't think in the commercial market we'll see it in any significant way.' Bill Gates, 2001."

    #1: That wasn't a "prediction." That was a positioning statement, meant for the ears of commercial buyers and software channels, that Microsoft will remove its good graces from anyone who tries to interfere with Microsoft's business operating system sales.

    #2: Microsoft revenues in Q1 2012 were $20B, or about 60 times Red Hat's. If anything, Microsoft is probably thrilled to have a relatively tiny, but still growing competitor in the market to keep the anti-trust folks at bay. (Remember those guys from about 10 years ago?)

  30. Niche market by magamiako1 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The point being that Red Hat is not competing against Microsoft but rather they are filling a different market than Microsoft. Make no mistake that Red Hat software is cheap. The TCO is fairly high since Linux Admins tend to command a much higher salary, generally don't crossover as much (I know plenty of Windows guys that do all around IT and fewer Linux guys that know Windows....far-fewer), and require much more manual care than a Windows environment.

    I've found completely different purposes for Windows and Linux environments most of the time, they solve different goals. I prefer IIS/MSSQL/Windows over most stuff in the enterprise but put in Linux when it fills a void in either licensing or application compatibility.

    1. Re:Niche market by Tsunayoshi · · Score: 1

      The TCO is fairly high since Linux Admins tend to command a much higher salary, generally don't crossover as much (I know plenty of Windows guys that do all around IT and fewer Linux guys that know Windows....far-fewer)

      Really? I've found it the complete opposite in my 12+ years of being a sysadmin...the people who started off from a linux background are generally good at being jacks of all trades, but the ones who started off from a Windows background aren't quite as well rounded. While I primarily do linux/unix work, my resume is also heavy into Windows stuff, so much that I went to a job interview once where the CIO/linux architect and his windows guru grilled me up and down on the stuff listed on my resume and at the end the Windows guy commented that I could probably do his job better than he could...then the CIO mentioned that they didn't really have an opening, they just wanted to interview this guy who had an "obviously bullshit resume" and were surprised that it wasn't BS...still didn't get me a job offer though (small company).

      The contractor currently working for me now is a massive exception, I was originally leery about his linux skill set since he came from a strong Windows environment with very little linux before coming to work for us, but his troubleshooting skills are godly impressive and there hasn't been anything he hasn't been able to figure out yet.

      --
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    2. Re:Niche market by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      I know plenty of Windows guys that do all around IT and fewer Linux guys that know Windows....far-fewer

      Really? I find that very hard to believe. I've hired lots of Windows guys and not yet had one that had a clue what to do at a Bash prompt. On the other hand, every Linux guy has been in front of a Windows machine at some point. You can't live in this world without coming across Windows somewhere.

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    3. Re:Niche market by magamiako1 · · Score: 1

      I guess it depends on where you are. Most of the Linux guys I know when you mention Active Directory start immediately jumping into LDAP without ever mentioning the fact that Windows' primary authentication mechanism is in fact Kerberos.

      That said, there's a wide variety of skill sets. Some of the deeper Linux gurus I know do indeed know that, but those people that "get it" are very few and far in between.

      I generally gauge someone's systems knowledge by throwing out a memory question. VERY few people understand memory usage, even fewer understand OS-specific memory usage, and even fewer understand how both Windows and Linux handle memory and how to troubleshoot OOM issues.

      As an example, depending on the job I'm looking for, if someone mentions that Windows is a "waste of memory", I generally don't consider them to be very technical.

      Dinner conversations with local nerd groups tend to be very interesting. One of them being a Red Hat employee, and you can very quickly see that HE knows what he's doing versus the rest of the crowd.

      Unfortunately, someone like that is a diamond in the rough.

    4. Re:Niche market by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      Linux guys like talking about LDAP because it's available as open source, not because they don't know that Active Directory uses Kerberos. I'm hardly an expert in authentication services and I know that. Tell your MSCE to set up an OpenLDAP server that authenticates against your AD server and see what the response is!

      The problem I found with hiring Windows admins is that there are thousands people jumping through the hoops at so-called technical schools to get their MSCE who simply don't understand what's is going on in the system. They pass the tests, but they can't solve problems. They just don't have the "knack," as Dilbert puts it.

      People often get into Linux because they are fascinated by computers and want to understand how computers and networks work on a deep level. Once you have that kind of knowledge, picking up another OS isn't very challenging.

      Of course, as Linux has grown in popularity, we're starting to see the same problem!

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    5. Re:Niche market by Patch86 · · Score: 1

      The point being that Red Hat is not competing against Microsoft but rather they are filling a different market than Microsoft.

      Nonsense. Red Hat's core business is for corporate servers and desktops. You know, the life blood of Microsoft's sales. It'd be true to say that Red Hat aren't competing with MS in the home computing space- but Microsoft has always been about the enterprise customers at its heart.

      Not that $1 billion will worry MS overly, but it's nice to see a FOSS company carving out a good living in a heavily competitive environment like that.

  31. Well by ledow · · Score: 1

    Just goes to show that nobody can predict the future with any accuracy, eh? Which makes you wonder why companies would listen to them in the first place.

    Who would have guessed that a cheap, ad-supported Worms rip-off (which itself was a Scorched-Earth rip-off, etc.) would get 10m downloads in the first day of the release of its... what... fifth title? And make an awful lot of money. While the Worms sequels tended towards the dire themselves?

    Who would have thought that the idea of a Linux smartphone would be a success? Who would have thought that just indexing the web and running statistics on the whole damn thing would make a better search engine than anyone else had ever made and create one of the most powerful companies in the world? Who would have thought that tablets wouldn't be successful until, well, Windows Tablet Edition's were dead and buried?

    Who would have thought that IBM would be sued by a dead shell of a company and it get drawn out to a multi-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit? Who would have though that just changing the screen type could make people buy MILLIONS of a popular e-book device?

    Things happen. And the WORST people to listen to are a) critics, b) "industry experts" that post popular columns in papers and journals and c) potential competitors about how those things would never happen.

    Microsoft keep trying to tell me that the cloud is the next thing I should buy into. Car manufacturers keep telling me that they'll make a fast, practical, environmentally-friendly car that I can afford. Solar / wind / wave power enthusiasts keep telling me that we'll all be running the country off them soon.

    The shock here is not that Red Hat made $1bn (and some of those comments were made only in 2010, which I would have considered stupid and short-sighted back then), but that people still think that their opinion matters when they are talking about a competitor, or that people base decisions on what Gartner and similar tell them as if they were the Oracle.

    The BIGGEST companies and successes in the world come about by surprise to even their owners. Who would have thought that the richest man in the world would be the one who wrote a BASIC interpreter?

    You cannot make predictions like that, and trying just makes you look stupid.

  32. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yeah, those are fine examples. You may want the linux desktop to forever be a clone of Windows XP (getting asymptotically closer but always staying an inferior replica) or just want no changes to the status quo, whatever it is. Others are happy about actual innovation (a pre-requisite of progress) even if that means some growing pains.

    Personally I'm not a fan of Unity and I'm sad of the further fragmentation that it represents on this field but I'm happy that Canonical is willing and able to make bold moves in this area. I love GNOME 3 however: 3.2 was already a more productive environment for me than GNOME 2 and I expect it to get better considerably faster than the previous version did. The more focused approach -- while obviously painful for the people who depended on features that are now hidden -- has enabled the GNOME team to concentrate on polishing the bits that they actually support in the core system.

  33. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yeah, in 10 years it's gone from .8% marketshare to 1.1%. great success!

  34. Red Hat is growing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...wait a minute, has it been confirmed by Netcraft yet?

  35. Year Of Linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So does this mean it's FINALLY The Year Of Linux?

  36. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

    If he did, it's odds on it was running Unix variant, not Linux.

  37. Who let... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    the freetard cunt be a journalist?

  38. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by pscottdv · · Score: 1

    I've been using Gnome 3 exclusively for nearly a year now. I love it.

    All four of my daughters have been using it. They love it.

    My wife uses it. She loves it.

    The only tweak I made was to reinstate the minimize button because I like it for a very specific workflow situation.

    I haven't tried unity, though, only Gnome shell

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    this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

  39. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by ozmanjusri · · Score: 1
    Barely.

    The 2011 Q4 stats from IDC show a 56.1 per cent increase in overall slab sales to 28.2 million units; up from the 15.8 million that punters splashed out on in Q3.
    In three months Android's percentage of the tablet market has shot up - Android was loaded on 44.6 per cent of tablets sold in Q4, up from 32.3 per cent in Q3.
    WebOS and BlackBerry have been practically crushed into the ground: WebOS had zilch and BlackBerry clocked a 0.7 per cent. Windows didn't make a showing. But while iOS is top, it won't be top forever.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/14/ipad_market_share_slips/

    --
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  40. Why is Gly Moody's Quote Included? by pscottdv · · Score: 1

    “Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion. Not because they are incompetent, or because open source will ‘fail’ in any sense. But because the economics of open source software – and therefore the business dynamics – are so different from those of traditional software that it simply won’t be possible in most markets.” – Glyn Moody

    There have been, in fact, very few open source startups to get to $1 billion. His quote seems right on.

    And before I get flamed, I and my family use Linux exclusively. I sold a mildly-successful, Linux-based business a few years ago.

    Of course, if you include any business for which open-source software is critical to its operations, like Google, Facebook or Amazon, then yeah, the quote is nonsense.

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  41. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by DerekLyons · · Score: 1

    Nope. from my ancient steam powered single core Win XP machine.

  42. Proud to be a stockholder! by bbbaldie · · Score: 1

    Albeit a modest one. I went to a week of Redhat server administration training back in 2005 and promptly went out and bought some stock which is now worth over twice what it was then.

  43. The S&P 500 is *not* the Fortune 500 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ... to their entry into the fortune 500.

    The S&P 500 is *not* the same thing as the Fortune 500.
    Redhat would need 40X their current revenue to have a crack at the Fortune 500.

    1. Re:The S&P 500 is *not* the Fortune 500 by rgbrenner · · Score: 1

      good catch.. I think I saw 500.. and filled in the rest subconsciously :)

  44. Re:Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of by pscottdv · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If anything, Microsoft is probably thrilled to have a relatively tiny, but still growing competitor in the market to keep the anti-trust folks at bay. (Remember those guys from about 10 years ago?)

    No. They are not. Because that $1 Billion revenue of RedHat's represents Hundreds of Billions of dollars of lost revenue to Microsoft. Every server running Linux is a server that MIGHT have a Windows license if free offerings such as Linux weren't so capable.

    Without RedHat and other tiddling (compared to Microsoft) companies improving Linux every day, Microsoft would be the highest revenue company in the world and their stock would still be increasing in value.

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  45. Red Hat killed Sun, nothing else by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you have spent some time in the DOD community (for one) - you wll have noted all of those SUn workstations are now x86 boxes running Red Hat.

    This is precisely how Red Hat grew.

    1. Re:Red Hat killed Sun, nothing else by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sun died on its own. I saw an awful lot of Debian replace it. That doesn't mean Debian killed it either. There was this whole idea of a commodity free OS on commodity hardware. It's pennies on the dollar vs. Sun. That's what killed them.

  46. Re:Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of by iserlohn · · Score: 1

    Actually, MS never had a monopoly in the server space and really has nothing to worry about in terms of anti-trust investigations. Outside of corporate IT (which itself is undergoing a huge transformation due to BYOD), corporate IT spawned app/web development (.NET/ASP), and gaming (which itself is debatable due to the looming death of dedicated gaming devices and the rise of smartphones and tablets), MS has no real momentum in software platforms.

  47. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes that is true, but blah blah bleat blah whine

    Whatever. Android has a larger market share than iOS. It really doesn't matter, and I really don't care, what sort of devices it is being shipped on. Nor does some hypothetical crap about what Apple "could" or "might" do. It doesn't change the fact that Android has a larger market share than iOS.

    So yes, you do need to look at what is actually going on before coming to an actual conclusion.

    Quite. Like, for example, the fact that Android has a larger market share than iOS.

  48. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by datavirtue · · Score: 1

    It was, then the whole fucking thing up-ended. Ubuntu 10.10 caused me to switch to Linux and 11 caused my to switch to Windows. It wasn't just the buggy interface, there were other problems with the 64bit distro on top of the train-wreck UI and graphical anomalies, and disappearing menus.....

    --
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  49. So, on the mark then? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    “Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion. Not because they are incompetent, or because open source will ‘fail’ in any sense. But because the economics of open source software – and therefore the business dynamics – are so different from those of traditional software that it simply won’t be possible in most markets.” – Glyn Moody

    While Red Hat is now the first (and only) $1 billion open source company

    Seems that Glyn was pretty well on the mark, I would say one qualifies as "very few."

  50. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 0

    So you don't actually care about any discussion on the subject then, you just care that your pet is number one, regardless of whether its comparable or not.

  51. Strategic Quote by JSBiff · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That quote sounds more like Strategic FUD. It doesn't take a genius to realize that when students and enthusiasts are, in large numbers, rallying to a competing operating system, you've got some future trouble heading your way.

    As the CEO of a large company, you're not going to say anything to try to *encourage* people to look at the competition, so you demean and minimize it.

  52. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by nschubach · · Score: 1

    As long as there are other desktop options that run GTK apps just as well, why does it matter? Don't like Gnome/Unity? Use KDE, xcfe, LXDE...

    --
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  53. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    Progress like Gnome 3 and Unity?

    Sure. KDE4 is nice too.

  54. Desktop market share ~1.5% by chrb · · Score: 3, Informative

    Is the Linux Desktop actually growing? quotes a market share figure from Net Applications of 1.4%, up from 0.97% the previous July. Other estimates have put the figure at 1.67%. Some analysts are predicting the figure could hit 2% to 3% before the end of 2012.

    The author states that 12% of visitors to his tech related web sites run Linux. If that is any indication, then the figure of technologically minded people using Linux desktops already exceeds 10%.

    Keep in mind that Apple's global desktop market share is in single figures: Linux desktop market share doesn't have to exceed that of Windows to be considered important.

  55. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What discussion? All you've done is pop up and post a bunch of hypothetical guesses about what Apple "could" or "might" do, and point out that a lot of Android devices are low end. How is that relevant? It doesn't change the fact that Android has a larger market share than iOS. How are Android and iOS "not comparable"? They're both mobile platforms. The hardware those platforms run on has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Android has a larger market share than iOS.

    Your previous post doesn't refute the fact that Android has a large market share than iOS and added nothing to the discussion. So why did you post it, other than a lame Apple fanboy attempt to deflect away the awkward issue (for yourself) that Android has a larger market share than iOS?

  56. Re:Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Because that $1 Billion revenue of RedHat's represents Hundreds of Billions of dollars of lost revenue to Microsoft. Every server running Linux is a server that MIGHT have a Windows license if free offerings such as Linux weren't so capable.

    I know you put the MIGHT in there but... Work for RIAA/MPAA by any chance?

  57. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by csubi · · Score: 1

    Ubuntu is not representative of the GNU/Linux based desktop OSes.

    Why don't you get an extra HDD that you can use to try out a couple of distros while double booting, also checking if your hardware (vendors) play right with Linux?

    With some effort to climb a learning curve (even better, ask a friend with experience!) you'd be surprised. My example : the last Windows I used was Win2K, around 2003 and I could not be happier.

  58. Oh god, apple fanboys, they are so funny by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 4, Funny

    So basically, your claim is that if you had a penis, it would be the largest?

    I seen fanboys make up some weird figures before, but claiming you are the top seller if you would be selling, that is a new one.

    Apple is a big mobile maker, but it is not the biggest. About the only claim that stands is that of single model high-end smartphone, Apple sells the most. That is not a bad title to hold but it has rather a lot of qualifiers.

    Mandatory car anology, Ferrari would be the biggest car maker, if they sold small cheap cars.

    --

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    1. Re:Oh god, apple fanboys, they are so funny by couchslug · · Score: 1

      "Mandatory car anology, Ferrari would be the biggest car maker, if they sold small cheap cars."

      Mandatory relative analogy. If my Aunt had a penis, she'd be my Uncle.

      --
      "This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
    2. Re:Oh god, apple fanboys, they are so funny by tolkienfan · · Score: 1

      New keyboard please

  59. And besides ... by Rambo+Tribble · · Score: 1

    ... I said "freedom rules", not open source, per se.

  60. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

    You're going to be disappointed I'm afraid. A new iPad comes out once a year. That analysis covers the quarter before the new iPad. Since that was written, the new retina iPad has had huge sales.

  61. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Actually everyone I've shown Gnome3 to has liked it and I actually had three (completely non technical) people ask me to install it for them (two use it regularly now). In adition I have my whole family using it with no compaints. I also know a rabid mac user (technical/developer) who needed a new notebook and chose a PC to run Ubuntu/Gnome3 on.

    I myself hated Gnome3 at first, but once I got used to it I couldn't go back. It's fast, keeps things out of the way, has an incredible level of integration with all sorts of things (pidgin/thunderbird/firefox/file history/etc.), and once you get used to the shell view it's crazy efficient and a great eye catcher. If enough people used it or were shown how great it works I think it just may be what puts Linux on the desktop.

  62. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by drodal · · Score: 1

    there is a desktop???

  63. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by drodal · · Score: 1

    more to the point who cares if it replaces the desktop

    I never thought it was going to do so, it didn't make sense. I DOES make sense to put it into every things that has a
    a cpu and no legacy crap to force it to be something else. But yeah I own apps that go back more than 10 years I still use. And it makes sense
    to have a pc or mac for those apps. and to continue to buy those types to continue to use them.

    so I think it was naive to think that everyone would have linux on their desktop, no reason to.

    But When the next thing takes over (like the ipad+ or something closer to a laptop/desktop/pad thing)

    I bet ANYTHING it will run some variant of Linux. (or unix)

    And that's how the microsoft monopoly will break up.

  64. Another billion thanks to HP & Oracle by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    Solaris and HP UX are being run into the ground with customers scared of Itanium, and upset that you need a $$$$ Oracle Database license to run Solaris.

    Linux is a much easier platform to migrate too.

    If it were not for Linux many organizations would be in a pickle over this. Actually if it were not for RedHat as an enteprise tested and supported platform is essential in these envrionments.

    1. Re:Another billion thanks to HP & Oracle by unixisc · · Score: 1

      What exactly is the installed base of Itanium? I'd think that those who were sold into buying it by the snake oil antics of HP, Intel, Compaq, SGI and others are SOL on this one. Only OS really there is HP/UX, although those who are adept w/ either FreeBSD or Debian can run it on their Itanic boxes, but then they are on their own. Red Hat is among those who've abandoned the Itanic.

      For customers that run Solaris, as I pointed out above, if they happen to be using Opteron or Xeon based Suns, they can switch to OpenIndiana., If they are on Sparc servers, they can go w/ any of the BSDs or Linuxes out there - all the major ones exist on Sparc. Maybe someone could work w/ the OpenIndiana project in porting that to the UltraSparc.

  65. Oracle helps Redhat by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    Many and I mean many Solaris shops are fuming with steam coming out of their ears with the outrageous licensing and requirements for Oracle Database when all they need is to run some servers and not their crappy RDBMS.

    Add to the fact that Oracle is scaring HP customers with Itanium away threatening to cancel support with the whole lawsuit there is making Redhat an attractive alternative to HP-UX.

    Sure some Oracle shops maybe using it. But many more who are former Sun shops and even HP shops feel more comfortable with Redhat. Some are switching to Windows but the dumb PHBs already migrated a decade ago and the smart ones know it does not fit the bill for every situation.

    1. Re:Oracle helps Redhat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Windows ME is an attractive alternative to HP-UX.

    2. Re:Oracle helps Redhat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nice trolling. I guess you have major trouble with any Unix command line.

  66. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 1

    When hell freezes over?

    Desktop is becoming less relavent. Linux or at least a *nix variant will likely own the tablet space (does now but even in the future), I think people will have more tablet/phone like devices than desktops. They still probably will have a desktop/laptop too but they might have 2-4 other computing devices (car systems, phone, tablet, eReader etc) and most of those will be running on *nix I suspect.

  67. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 1

    Borat marketing strategist? :-) Great success, me have sexy time.

  68. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by justforgetme · · Score: 1

    Have you seen the last gnome 3 and unity?

    I was hating on them quite a bit about a year ago but they seem to have started maturing.
    Now stop being learn shy and go figure out how to use those new DEs like a real nerd!

    --
    -- no sig today
  69. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by MonsterTrimble · · Score: 1

    Nobody said evolution was perfect.

    --
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  70. Meanwhile... by viperidaenz · · Score: 0

    Microsoft is nearly $70B revenue and Apple is over $100B

  71. Redhats success mostly a result of free labour. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A few years ago someone calculated what the total cost for development for linux was in terms of manhours and a medium hourly rate. If I'm not remembering incorrectly it was above 10 billion USD.

    So if people really got paid all the linux companies would be in the red, BIG TIME.

    It's a result of free labour.

  72. Re:Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of by rgbrenner · · Score: 1

    hundreds of billions? exaggerate much? A Windows Server Standard 2008 license is $700... for $1100, you can get 10 licenses. (from newegg)

    cheapest RH subscription: $350 without any support

    So even if every one of those RH clients bought Windows licenses 1 at a time, that $1b would only be $2b.

  73. Yay economies of scale! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    First - welcome to where Microsoft was in 1990. (http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/History/The-History-of-Microsoft-1990) Apple? 1982 bitchez.. (http://apple2history.org/appendix/ahb/ahb3/)

    Second - Gee, that's super, now do it eleven more times. (http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-billion-dollar-businesses-2011-10?op=1) Oh, wait a second...a dozen more times (http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/07/11/android-could-be-a-billion-dollar-business-for-microsoft/) Apple? Do it a hundred times over. In CASH not revenue. (http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/18/apple-cash-reserves-conference-call/)

    Third - It's the time for linux dominance you say...because of Android? Well, demand for the non-Linux iPad is off the freaking charts (no source needed, just try and buy one right now.) Android tablets...the most optimistic estimate in the world pegs them as being outsold by the iPad by an 8 to 1 margin (http://gigaom.com/mobile/android-vs-ipad-the-tablet-sales-figures-that-matter/) Even the Kindle Fire can't even keep up. Amazon won't divulge sales figures of the Fire because compared to the iPad the Fire is an aborted baby...it never had a chance. Oh, but it's still a small win for you, because you think Windows phone sucks? Dude, wake up. Win Phone is still very much in the development phase. Once MS starts tying it into its other highly successful platforms (Windows, Xbox Live, etc) you won't have it to kick around anymore. And yes, they can (and will) do that. Finally, see my second point on my second point...Android is making MS a TON of money. Boo hoo hoo...patents suck....stifle innovation...boo hoo...they stifle so much innovation that Android never even came out, right?!!?!

  74. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by jones_supa · · Score: 1

    Then you could also give Windows 7 a shot. ;)

  75. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by csubi · · Score: 1

    I see no reasons to do so.
    What I use now is free and legal plus the neat separation of user and system files just makes managing it so easier. Add in central software management and no hunt for device drivers and such. Just much cleaner.
    And, I won't trust an OS that needs 20GB space for installation.

    This said, I don't hold any grudge against Windows, I just don't care any more :)

  76. Re:Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of by pscottdv · · Score: 2

    We're looking at this differently. I'm saying that if it weren't for RedHat and all the other people working on Llinux and/or other free offerings, Microsoft and proprietary Unix would be only choices for all those servers out there. Millions of them. And I doubt Microsoft would be selling licenses at 10 for $1100 if free competion didn't exist.

    Every sale RedHat and every other seller of Linux makes supports not only their paying clients, but scores of additional users who make use of the software they write without paying. I think it is quite conservative to guess that every dollar RedHat earns equates to a loss of $100 of revenue from Microsoft.

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  77. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Larryish · · Score: 1

    Single core FTW.

    A P4 or Pentium M does what I need it to do, cheaply.

  78. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

    You should upgrade your typewriter.

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  79. Red Hat is easier to say than Unbuntu by omfglearntoplay · · Score: 1

    I really wish Unbuntu would change their name. It's killing them. I've started hearing users say "I have an android type computer at my house". I say "Linux? Unbuntu?" They say "No, let me check with Bob.". Check with Bob... yeah it was Unbuntu.

    Anyway, go Red Hat and good for you! Red Hat got me respecting Linux years ago when I first touched it.

  80. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by ozmanjusri · · Score: 1
    We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?

    Apple Gets Lukewarm Reaction With New iPad
    "Apple's stock is coming off a 52-week high of $548.21 during the March 1 trading session. The shares closed at $541.99 the day it launched the new iPad."

    http://www.investoruprising.com/author.asp?section_id=1497&doc_id=240365&f_src=investoruprising_sitedefault

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  81. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

    And just 3 weeks later, the price is $609.86.
    That's 12% higher.

    You make my point for me.

  82. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by s.petry · · Score: 1

    Honestly I don't see why so many people think that Gnome is the only answer. I have used RedHat and KDE for nearly 10 years without issues. I have supported DOD sites with this requirement due to the KIOSK features built in to KDE, which is similar to Windows group policy without the massive head cramps one can get from configuring the policy and pushing them to clients.

    As the other person mentioned, I run RedHat at work and Fedora at home, because it's free and legal. No need to worry about the software police taking me to court and taking my house and firstborn because they claim I downloaded an illegal copy of Windows, or Office, or Windows Media Player, etc...

    And before you say it - I know of a couple people that have been taken to court by the BSA for running work software at home illegally (Windows, VISIO and Office), so don't say "that does not happen".

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  83. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

    These stats are for smartphones only. If you also throw in tablets, iOS is #1 again, and by a fairly large margin.

  84. Re:Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of by puregen1us · · Score: 2

    Except that MS can't sell the licenses for all their other products if the OS is RHEL.

    So, they lose the OS license, but also the licenses for SQL, and CRM, and Exchange, and SharePoint, and Terminal Services, and all the other stuff that might be running on there.

  85. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by ozmanjusri · · Score: 1

    You make my point for me.

    No, there's more to the post that does not support your conclusion. However as a fanboi, you can only see confirmation of your existing bias.

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  86. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

    The only other thing in your post was the title and the link. As I showed, 3 weeks later it's clear that the article title got it wrong.

    BTW, you look like even more of an idiot when you can't spell "fanboy".

  87. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by aiht · · Score: 1

    Nobody said evolution was perfect.

    No, but Thunderbird is pretty good.

  88. They contribute a lot to the computing society. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Red hat has been around for some time now, i'm glad to see them growing. They need to grow, and Linux needs to over take Windows. Thats what we need, open source for the win.

  89. Yeah but... by unixisc · · Score: 1
    ...the story mentions a whole host of Linux uses not remotely related to Red Hat, Inc.:

    Linux is used to power everything from ATMs to TV, from cell phones to servers. Android is based on Linux. Facebook and Google were both built on Linux and most of the Fortune 500 use it in in their data centers today. Linux also runs one-third of the world's websites, according to W3Techs.com.

    The reason Red Hat made their billion is their services to companies who buy their distro - something they are professional at, in contrast to Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and so on. The only other companies remotely in their league were VA Linux and Caldera, but both are history. At any rate, Red Hat has nothing to do w/ Android, Facebook or Google. It's more a competitor to IBM and Oracle, which TFA also lists.

    I'm glad that Red Hat is doing well. Hopefully, they'll clean up their RPM and YUMM installation packages, so that one doesn't run into dependencies all the time, and make them at par w/ apt get, pbi and so on. I also wish them well against the likes of Centos. Another thing they could do - acquire one of the databases out there, like Interbase, tune it to RHEL and make themselves a complete suite & solution.

    Incidentally, what is RHEL's choice of DE? Is it now on GNOME3 like Fedora, or have they gone w/ something else? Another thing they could do - create a GNUSTEP DE that's like NEXTSTEP and make it their default UI, and make OO programming one of their specialties, just like it was w NEXT, and be recognized for that. It would give them something to separate themselves in the market, and add selling software to their selling services.

  90. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by unixisc · · Score: 1

    Well, Fedora is #3, w/ both Mint and Ubuntu ahead and OpenSuse and Debian not far behind. If Red Hat fixes RPM, Fedora can advance a lot more. Fedora ought to take a page out of PC-BSD's PBI so that they don't have those stupid dependency problems screwing up their entire installations.

  91. Itanic and Sparc options by unixisc · · Score: 1

    Oracle is by no means alone in dropping Itanic. Microsoft, RedHat and Canonical had dropped it long ago (I'm not sure whether Ubuntu ever had it in the first place), and even among the BSDs, only FreeBSD supports it (although NetBSD may have finally ported 6 to it, but OpenBSD definitely hasn't.) If any company is using Integrity servers, their options are HP/UX, FreeBSD or Debian Linux. For databases, they can take ProgreSQL, or maybe fork MySQL. If they want commercial support of the type RHEL provides, they are best off w/ HP/UX. If they want to avoid complete dependence on HP, they're better off going the Debian or FreeBSD routes.

    As for the Solaris shops, I'm assuming that we're talking here about those using Sun UltraSparc servers? If that's the case, there is a range of alternatives - all the BSDs, RHEL, Debian, so chances are whatever they'd be most likely to use if they had Xeon or Opteron based servers - they could use w/ their Suns. If we're talking about Opteron or Xeon based servers, the choice is even greater - they could switch to OpenIndiana and short-circuit Oracle trying to rip them off w/ RDBMS. These Solaris shops have plenty of options - only thing they're lacking is that if they are on Sparcs and want to go from Solaris to OpenIndiana, they're out of luck, and have to look into other solutions like OpenBSD, Debian, FreeBSD, et al.

  92. Re:what they don' tell you by eric_herm · · Score: 1

    This is not Canonical ( with the alleged 10 millions revenue due to goodies ), the details are on the SEC filling ( http://investors.redhat.com/sec.cfm )

  93. OEL Sparc by unixisc · · Score: 1

    Speaking of which, does Oracle offer OEL on their UltraSparc based servers?

  94. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by javacowboy · · Score: 1

    It doesn't matter if there are more devices running Android because Apple is more profitable than any of them.

    Also, Apple sells more iPhones than each of the Android licensees.

    Comparing an operating system (Android) to a company (Apple) is really disingenuous.

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  95. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by crutchy · · Score: 1

    in the barrage of junk mail catalogs i get, all are android based except the ipad, the android ones are always cheaper (significantly) and there is decent offering of them from different companies. not everyone has a pic of steve jobs glued to the face of their inflatable sex doll.

  96. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by KugelKurt · · Score: 1

    You may want the linux desktop to forever be a clone of Windows XP (getting asymptotically closer but always staying an inferior replica)

    Except for the long-dead XPde there never was a DE that tried to imitate WinXP -- probably because XP had absolutely terrible usability! Any somewhat popular Linux DE from XP's era was vastly superior to XP.

  97. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by crutchy · · Score: 1

    then you're a fool for thinking consumers are intelligent

    "money talks and bullshit walks"... always

  98. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

    I never said consumers are intelligent. On average they're more like you.

  99. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by crutchy · · Score: 1

    more like you

    care to elaborate?

  100. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by badkarmadayaccount · · Score: 1
    --
    I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
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