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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.
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....
But, does it run linux?
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.
Did you post that from a tablet computer by chance?
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]).
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.
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);
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!
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...
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.
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.
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....
Progress like Gnome 3 and Unity?
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.
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.
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?)
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....
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.
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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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.