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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.
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.
The free version of RHEL is CentOS or Scientific Linux, not Fedora. Fedora is, as you note, a upstream, fast-moving, bleeding-edge, "test" OS. If that's not what you want then you're using the wrong thing.
Redhat's success really has little to do with open source, other than they could take advantage of the fact that someone else created the Linux kernel for them and they could build on that.
Who funds Linux development? RedHat: 11.2%
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
They really did not. Especially not on Debian. Everyone had their say, publicly, and the majority of Debian maintainers chose systemd over sysvinit/OpenRC.
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.
All of what you say is accurate, however, RH don't paywall the code, just the binaries. This is how CentOS and friends exist - RH publish the source RPMs to comply with the GPL, and from the beginning ensured everyone knew they were there. They also announced that if you wanted to use them to build your own products, you would have to strip out all of RH's logos and other IP (hence the "prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" of CentOS).
CentOS is now pretty tight with RH as well, as they've directly sponsored CentOS since 2014 and have hired the project leaders.