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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);
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?
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.
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....
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.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
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.
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.