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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."
More like Green Hat! WOOOOO!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Since when did Jesse Cox start using Linux?
Trending: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/A-billion-thanks-to-the-open-source-community-from-Red-Hat?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook
Thanks to both RedHat and OpenSource communities!
"It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
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....
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But, does it run linux?
... 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% 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.
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
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.
... King George III probably said that those rebellious colonists in America would never amount to anything, either. Freedom rules.
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]).
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);
At what cost?
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is that 99% of that revenue is from merchandise.
no complaints, though. hat looks *great*.
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...
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.
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.
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.
...why keep paying them for support when we never use it? We have already started migrating all servers to Centos 6.
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?)
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.
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.
So does this mean it's FINALLY The Year Of Linux?
the freetard cunt be a journalist?
“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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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.
... 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.
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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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.
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.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
“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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... I said "freedom rules", not open source, per se.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
http://saveie6.com/
Microsoft is nearly $70B revenue and Apple is over $100B
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.
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.
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?!!?!
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking of which, does Oracle offer OEL on their UltraSparc based servers?
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