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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.
Spell it "SystemD" not "systemd"
That way it looks like an ASCII penis.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
They really did not. Especially not on Debian. Everyone had their say, publicly, and the majority of Debian maintainers chose systemd over sysvinit/OpenRC.
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.
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.
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