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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!
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?
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.
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);
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....