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Red Hat Becomes First $2 Billion Open-Source Company (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Red Hat just became the first open-source company to make a cool 2 billion bucks. Not bad considering Red Hat became the first billion dollar Linux company only four years ago. Red Hat did it the old-fashioned way: They earned the money instead of playing upon the gullibility of venture capitalists. Red Hat's total revenue for its fourth quarter was $544 million. That's up 17 percent in U.S. dollars year-over-year, or 21 percent measured constant currency. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $480 million, up 18 percent in U.S. dollars year-over-year, or 22 percent measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue in the quarter was 88 percent of total revenue. Analysts estimated Red Hat would make $534 million. Looking ahead for its 2016 FY Red Hat expects to see between $2.380 billion to $2.420 billion. At this rate, Red Hat should easily become the first $3 billion open-source company.
While Red Hat's president and CEO Jim Whitehurst credits the "hybrid cloud infrastructures," Red Hat's subscription revenue can largely be ascribed to Red Hat's flagship product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Still, RHEL, which is now available on Microsoft Azure, is becoming a prominent cloud operating system.
While Red Hat's president and CEO Jim Whitehurst credits the "hybrid cloud infrastructures," Red Hat's subscription revenue can largely be ascribed to Red Hat's flagship product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Still, RHEL, which is now available on Microsoft Azure, is becoming a prominent cloud operating system.
Red Hat was the first company to exploit that while "open source" means you have access to the code, it doesn't mean they have to tell you what it does.
I've long switched to debian-based distributions, but I remember buying boxed distros in the 90s to help support the commercialization of Linux. I'm still waiting for LOTD*, but a win's a win.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
$2B in revenue and $288M in earnings for the year. Still nothing to sneeze at.
That's chump change in tech. What they need to do is make their Mountain View office their World Wide Headquarters, get known as a social media company or whatever the Current Big Thing is, and since they actually make money and they're not some pie in the sky bullshit, get valued at One Hundred BILLION dollars!
What a fucking world we live in where a solid company is valued much less than money losing shit. But that's Silly Valley for ya!
add a hateful ad for Microsoft's cloud attempt?
closing access to the security/bug repositories except to paying customers isn't the open source spirit. RedHat forgets who made them great, it was us in the 90s that could install and try it out, and became sold on it so we introduced it at work by buying the full support.
That's why a lot of us have tossed RH over the side at work now for alternatives. Using Fedora, an alternative distro that makes the users test rats for RH brain farts, is making us 2nd class citizens.
My understanding is that Red Hat is strong enough that the company was able to force systemd on the Linux community, and did that because the unfinished, poorly documented systemd brings in more money for Red Hat support.
Any sense in that?
From systemd apologists
RHEL licensing fees are precisely why my organization is migrating to Windows.
A Windows SA Site license makes it cheaper to run Windows Servers than RHEL.
It's a particular sort of statement. When they said '$2B company', that *usually* refers to market cap (which can indeed be exaggerated by unfounded confidence).
To refer to a '2B company' meaning 'company that pulled in 2B of revenue in a year, that's a bit different.
Hence the errant comparison of revenue to overvalued startup unicorns.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Generally, when you say 'an X dollar company', people are referring to market cap, or the aggregate consensus value believed in by your investors.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yes, I understand all of that. That doesn't change the fact that the submitter is a buffoon who doesn't understand what he's writing about - RedHat earned over 2bn in *revenues* - their market capitalization has long since passed 2 bn - it's currently in the 13.5 billion vicinity.
If you're going to make twattish statements about venture capital that are irrelevant to the subject at hand, don't be surprised when you get called a fucking idiot - a person who does this is, demonstrably, a fucking idiot.
You have no idea what you're talking about, AC.
Is it too many espresso shots or a stronger drug with you?
"... the majority of Debian maintainers chose systemd... "
But why? Were there reasons other than good management? Was it difficult to ignore something Red Hat did?
I remember well the Red Hat IPO. It was supposedly open to the public on E*trade and I was at work waiting to buy in, but turns out it was only available for an instant, not sure how long exactly, but anyway I and many others missed the boat and were pretty angry, especially when it rocketed from IPO price of $14 to $300. Some even complained to the SEC. It split 2:1 but then fell below $5 so I bought a bunch then, it's certainly done better than most of the tech bubble stocks.
The mailing list is public, go and check it. Alternately, this site was put together as a summary of the various positions and options. If I can characterize it, there was a strong desire to move away from sysvinit due to lack of features, bugs, and difficulty of maintenance. Systemd at the time was seen as the best of the alternatives, offering more features and easier maintenance, at the cost of compatibility with non-Linux systems.
Not that I have any great insight into the minds of developers, but I suspect that the decision might have gone otherwise if it were re-held today. I think there would be a stronger consensus against sysvinit, as even fewer people are interested in maintaining those scripts. OpenRC has had more time to mature, and as far as I know Upstart development has basically ended. Interestingly, OpenRC and systemd share a number of features, particularly in their heavy use of C libraries, for which OpenRC receives no criticism and systemd no end to criticism. Either way it looks like that, dependency resolution, cgroup support, and parallel startup have made everybody's minimum feature list. I'm sure it would have been an even more different story if cgroups/process tracking had been a part of sysvinit/POSIX to begin with, but as I understand they were mostly codifying existing practices rather than trying to actually create a good standard.
In any case, Debian moving away from sysvinit wasn't any more influenced by Red Hat than it was by Canonical. All options were on the table, and each of them had their proponents. There was somewhat more backlash against systemd than other options, but I don't think politics played much of a hand in the decision -- politics didn't have to maintain the code afterwards. And despite the popular clamor for sysvinit, most everyone else seems to have dropped it happily, so ignoring the populace seems to have been the right decision in that respect.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
"Red Hat did it the old-fashioned way: They earned the money instead of playing upon the gullibility of venture capitalists."
Running your company like IBM in it's golden era is not praiseworthy either.
Most Products and Services in the IT world are that way. Dell Computers are more expensive not because they are better, but rather because you get "Enterprise" support. Do not underestimate the power of "Enterprise Support" in the world of CIOs and Directors of IT. They have a distinct aversion to taking the blame for bad decisions, and that "Enterprise" label allows them to shift blame to the vendors.
Personally I like "Enterprise" hardware because the lights out management is often better than the cheap-o stuff, especially when it comes to blade chassis.
Perhaps if you have a bunch of "cattle" servers that are cookie cutter, and it doesn't matter if a bunch are up or down, but many of us are in smaller environments, and even with virtualization, a lot of servers are still "pet-like".
When did Redhat go back to being open source?
Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock smoking teabaggers.