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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 made the decision to go with systemd for their own operating system. They didn't "force" it on anyone else. If you're unhappy with Debian / whoever else's decision to use systemd you'd better to talk to those maintainers. Obviously they see value in it or they wouldn't be using it.
As an actual Director of IT, aversion to taking the blame for things that are my responsibility has nothing to do with it.
I have a limited team of people to work with, and I have a lot of things to manage, including the phone system, the data center, our office network connections, security, desktop support, and the list goes on.
What I don't have the time to do is take my small team and build brand spanking new solutions myself. I pay someone to provide 4 hour support so that when my tired ass needs to show up in the data center at 4am, there is a disk or even a whole new box waiting for me that I know is going to work. And often a technician to put it in for me.
One time, I remember mentioning looking at the price tag for some service that would cost me $10K a year and thinking I could totally do that myself. I mentioned that to someone else and he pretty much said, there is no way that you can do that for ten thousand dollars if you actually add up the costs of building and maintaining that. He reminded me of a rule I have: Only do something yourself if you know you are the best person to do it. In the end, I might save $10K only to cause myself sleepless nights and reduce the availability of my systems.
Yes, people get ripped off all the time. You won't see me touch Oracle with a ten foot pole unless I absolutely, positively, need the high end features it provides. I will use an open source DB or a cheaper commercial one. But I will still throw down money for support, because they know this stuff better than I do and can get it to work faster than I can. That makes my company able to make money and the people at it able to do their jobs. Enterprise support is not something you buy just because of the label, but if they really do provide good Enterprise support, you put that shit on your budget and you don't look back.