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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.
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.
Redhat doesn't make money selling Linux. They make money selling support contracts. When you buy RHEL that's what you are actually paying for.
No different than buying the "Enterprise" version of Windows.
I'm not so nice: I switched to Ubuntu because, as much as I dislike their politics (Mir vs Wayland, Unity vs Gnome-3, etc.), they provide software *correctly*.
RHEL will suddenly break your shit mid-release. They won't ship an out-of-tree kernel module or a patch to a kernel driver to save your life, so good luck with RHEL 6 and Intel e1000e NICs (get the -lt kernel from ElRepo; but you can't remove RH Kernel or you break LSB, so have fun managing your bootloader as it keeps switching back to the broken one and then dropping network entirely on a kernel OOPS). They freeze the distro at a point release (6.7, 6.8, 6.9...) as they publish security patches, while ripping out some configuration subsystems and throwing in new ones (what has worked last week no longer works today, and you can freeze your release and not get further support!).
It's not even about being 9 years out-of-date on dot-zero release day--that's what Ubuntu over Debian is about. It's about having a zero-length support cycle on system-breaking changes. It's like if Microsoft upgraded Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 but kept calling it Windows 2003, and told you you could avoid all the major system changes by turning off all updates before that patch cycle--and suddenly the configuration files, registry entries, and supported features change or are outright deprecated and removed out from under you.
In Debian policy, you don't break things during release unless you have an extreme circumstance. If it worked on release day, it will work on EOL day. The software may be ass-old and out-of-date, but it's going to be the same software all throughout release, with the same configuration, the same features, and the same behavior. They might break something if that's the only way to remove a critical security vulnerability, but not if they can find another way around. Ubuntu turns this into a 6-month release cycle with 3 months to get your shit together after each release, or you can have a 2 year release cycle with 5 year support (LTS).
I never use RHEL-style distributions if I can avoid it.
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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.
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.
When you build the solution yourself, and it doesn't work, you get the blame. When you have Dell or someone else "Enterprise" build it, and it doesn't work, you can blame the vendor. That difference is worth the price for the people that care.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
We recently bought a set of servers from ___, Enterprise VMWare destined servers, and the SSDs? LiteOn. Which failed to deliver the performance needed for the job. Flat out didn't work. Granted, the company _____ replaced the drives, eventually, after we proved they were not capable. The problem I have, is I would NEVER have spec'ed LiteOn Drives for anything even close to "Enterprise".
And in the end, we wasted nearly 4 Man Months of time trying to fix the problem.
And my boss, buys Enterprise, even when I can PROVE that they are exactly the same, off the shelf consumer products, for twice the price. Me, I would buy two for the price of "Enterprise" and keep one on the shelf as a Spare. Knowing where you can get the perfomance you need, at a price that isn't "Enterprise" often allows you to stretch your IT budget AND provide the support your organization needs.
I'll pay for support, I'll even pay a lot for support. But I won't pay for "Enterprise" that is only "consumer" with a new label.
Here is BACKBLAZE's article on Drives t hat kind of supports my view ... https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.