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'Open Source Creators: Red Hat Got $34 Billion and You Got $0. Here's Why.' (tidelift.com)
Donald Fischer, who served as a product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux during its creation and early years of growth, writes: Red Hat saw, earlier than most, that the ascendance of open source made the need to pay for code go away, but the need for support and maintenance grew larger than ever. Thus Red Hat was never in the business of selling software, rather it was in the business of addressing the practical challenges that have always come along for the ride with software. [...] As an open source developer, you created that software. You can keep your package secure, legally documented, and maintained; who could possibly do it better? So why does Red Hat make the fat profits, and not you? Unfortunately, doing business with large companies requires a lot of bureaucratic toil. That's doubly true for organizations that require security, legal, and operational standards for every product they bring in the door. Working with these organizations requires a sales and marketing team, a customer support organization, a finance back-office, and lots of other "business stuff" in addition to technology. Red Hat has had that stuff, but you haven't.
And just like you don't have time to sell to large companies, they don't have time to buy from you alongside a thousand other open source creators, one at a time. Sure, big companies know how to install and use your software. (And good news! They already do.) But they can't afford to put each of 1100 npm packages through a procurement process that costs $20k per iteration. Red Hat solved this problem for one corner of open source by collecting 2,000+ open source projects together, adding assurances on top, and selling it as one subscription product. That worked for them, to the tune of billions. But did you get paid for your contributions?
And just like you don't have time to sell to large companies, they don't have time to buy from you alongside a thousand other open source creators, one at a time. Sure, big companies know how to install and use your software. (And good news! They already do.) But they can't afford to put each of 1100 npm packages through a procurement process that costs $20k per iteration. Red Hat solved this problem for one corner of open source by collecting 2,000+ open source projects together, adding assurances on top, and selling it as one subscription product. That worked for them, to the tune of billions. But did you get paid for your contributions?
...free software isn't free after all.
Why is this an article? Did these people actually expect to receive compensation?
Not the money.
Please send money. I really need to move out of my mom's basement.
xrb_3p3uwue56ipfm7ucunjdyw64ixtcctmxfdo761ayr94s1xuxe7wy7t4dkk7f
I have been using their software since the mid-90s with version 3. I have never paid them anything. I bought a third party book on it once, they may have gotten some revenue from that.
Red hat has hired and payed a huge number of people to develop and contribute to open source code. They've made massive contributions to Linux and are a key part of why it has become what it is today. Fedora/RHEL/CentOS may not be your favorite flavor but the simple fact is that in order to compete against them your favorite flavor adopted things made by them and had to compete with their usability. There are dozens of things in your home right now which are better because of Red Hat's contribution, not to mention all the things you use online.
I'm not rich because of Red Hat but I have gotten paid. Sadly I was a broke teenager when their IPO happened and the people I strongly advised to get in on it didn't listen.
I've shared source code updates for for-profit companies before, and do not mind if I don't get updated. Same would be true if I had contributed to Red Hat...
However it does seem like it would really be a great gesture of goodwill, to give some large amount of money (say $10k) to the top 100 RedHat contributors, however they felt like defining it...
I guess the danger is of course it may make many other jealous, who were just below the cutoff... so maybe it's better just to leave it as is.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
if we lived in a world with UBI and the like. The folks doing this do it because they like doing it. There aren't a lot of people who think that way but in a world of 7 billion humans there's more than enough; and truly intelligent people don't waste their time sitting golden toilets. They don't need Veblen goods and conspicuous consumption.
The hard part is that despite all the progress we live in a world of "if you don't work you don't eat". Even in first world nations like America we live like sharks: stop swimming for a moment and you suffocate.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Red Hat has been one of the biggest contributors in the open source ecosystem for a very long time. For the kernel in particular consider unlike many of the other major contributors they are not writing code to supporting their own hardware.
At the end, he makes a pitch for his company. This is advertising disguised as news. Shameful.
1100 npm packages
What does the Node.js package manager got to do with Redhat Linux?
but I have a bigger dick
If you look at the top most contributing devs, you'll notice that they are actually on the pay roll of companies who rely on linux. If they weren't already employed by Red Hat, they would probably be at Intel, Google, even IBM themselves...
Not all programmers are poor. If they are anywhere near competent (and open-source software makes a great portfolio that is easy to show around), they'll certainly get hired, perhaps even get paid for their open-source hobby.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Just because someone built a $34 billion company based entirely on providing support for the software you wrote doesn't mean you're entitled to a dime. That's not what FOSS is about, and you cheapen it by making it sound like you expect to be compensated for someone else's windfall.
As an open source developer I enjoy coding. As a unix admin type I hate users. If someone else wants to be compensated for supporting them as a business then that seems a fair trade off.
Ok guys, who is paying for systemd please step up in front of that wall.
One person pump primed two companies making billions selling out to their competitors in the last few months. The folks who adopted opensource software showed that the DIY additude wins over pay for play.
If I wanted to spend time on an infomercial, I'd turn on the TV
Have gnu, will travel.
This is news? Redhat has to compete with free distributions, and they've done it very well.
Very early on, before CentOS I did buy subscriptions to RHEL. And it was a good deal since they supported the software for years, which wasn't common at the time time. That ended very quickly when CentOS came about. I haven't actually downloaded or installed RHEL for more than a decade, and the companies I've worked for have all used CentOS, not RHEL. Why would I when I have CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu?
RHEL is largely for very rich companies that want these kind of assurances. Indemnification, etc. Redhat has made tons of money off of these additional services, and good for them. They've truly added value to the distribution, and encouraged mega-corp to use OSS, which benefits everyone.
This article was written by Microsoft in 1999.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Founders of the Atlanta Linux Showcase, which was the main Linux convention in the late 90's, worked their asses off, for free, to make the event happen every year. After a few years Red Hat gave the major contributors some stock, for free, as a thank you. I'm sure they did the same to others, this is just the case I know of.
In addition, Red Hat hired many contributors to open source, and gave them a good job so that they could continue to develop software, not just for Red Hat but for all of us. Remember Alan Cox? Me too, but there's many more. I'm sure all of those great technical hires got stock and each is getting a bit of the $34 billion.
Red Hat has always been less selfish and more fair than most software companies. They've always reflected open-source values, IMHO.
I got and get paid by using their contributions to the kernel, among other things. Open Source is a barter economy.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's why
you could write this article 100x times ... apple gives back - llvm ... google gave us kubernetes ... red hat gave us ... um... gnome? nevermind - they'll fit in great with IBM
apple built walled garden out of open source - sitting on billions
google built spy state out of open source - sitting on billions
and so it goes
developers get $0 because they write software that has essentially $0 value - the real value is getting people to pay top dollar for commodities - apple's devices have like a 50% price premium over their cost to manufacture, google gets your personal information worth many times the value they give you in free services
so enjoy your $0, you earned it - next time learn to talk hipsters out of a premium to get a laptop with no eithernet connection
from the efforts of individual FOSS contributors. I bet he says no.
I also bet his answer will be a long speech.
No one owes you anything. That's what it means to volunteer your time.
Karl Marx' argument is clearly lost on you. The capitalist (or, rather, the KKKapitali$st) paying you a fixed sum profits from the Surplus Value — the benefit, Marx' adherents claim to be undeserved.
You are being exploited — a word with very negative connotations — and simply must be unhappy about it...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Under what circumstances would you (gripers) then recommend to produce and release open source software, such that you would get some payback if a comparable windfall occurred partly based on your work?
"Open source, but with strings attached?"
What does Richard Stallman think about this?
If scientific discoveries were copyrightable in the way of music and movies
They are. The term of exclusive rights is just a lot shorter for an invention than for a work of authorship.
This is a ridiculous story.
1) Under most OSS licenses, allowing others to sell your software you create is *specifically* allowed.
2) RH mostly sells services/support to big companies. The software itself is freely available.
3) RH employs a lot of people that work on OSS which in turn is freely given away.
If a dev was worried about somebody else making money off of their software they can either not open source it, or put a license that forbids commercial use. Problem solved. In my experience, open sourcing some of my higher quality libraries has attracted companies that have paid me *years* worth of salaries to continue to work on and improve them. (shrugs)
A lot of RH revenue trickled down into salaries of Red Hart personnel (of which many are open source developers hired by RH at some point).
Quite the tone to this article, if money is your metric of success then more power to you, but don't be so snarky about it
Only a idiot gives his code away for free.
They do, just indirectly. What we get is an operating system
That is a great point and a. good reminder about the value that people who seem to work for "free" are really getting from the work. They probably are not working if they do not benefit from the result itself.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is another aspect people are ignoring. Linux has been corporate controlled and developed for years. A lot of work has been subsidized, and therefore directed, by various corporations. Linux is long past the point where it is primarily a "hobbyist" and "volunteer" effort.
The Linux foundation reports that 75% of kernel development is done by corporate sponsored developers. Who tops the list of these corporate sponsors? Red Hat.
https://www.computerweekly.com...
And why do you think that you deserve anything????? Because you suck air? Piss water? Or is it because mommy told you that you were special?
What the F did you do to deserve anything? Did you give away your time because that is what YOU WANTED TO DO and now you feel cheated because you are so naive and stupid that you probably think that this is "unfair" and that your school teachers should have taught you that you deserve what you earn and you earn things by getting paid.
Don Fischer is probably just butthurt that he isn't getting rich from the sale of RedHat. As a long time Linux/RedHat/CentOS/Fedora user and minor contributor, RedHat (the company) has provided me far more value than I have provided them. I have absolutely no problem with their business model or sale to IBM.
Remember: not only RH pay salary for FLOSS engineers and supporters...
No, but Red Hat tops the list and IBM is #4:
..."
"The top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report (or Linux kernel 2.6.36) are:
1. Red Hat,
2. Intel,
3. Novell,
4. IBM,
5. Texas Instruments,
6. Broadcom,
7. Nokia,
8. Samsung,
9. Oracle
10. and Google."
"... more than 7,800 developers from almost 800 different companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began in 2005. Of particular interest perhaps is the finding that — seventy-five percent of all kernel development is done by developers who are being paid for their work
https://www.computerweekly.com...
Because I have a stable operating system, build tools, applications, and even a few games that I have been using for years that I do not have to pay a large corporation for. How much would I have had to pay microsoft or apple for twenty years of software?
http://nwbagpipes.com/
It was open source software. Free.
When they went with the support business model, I knew someone was going to get screwed. "Thanks for making this great piece of software, community, but it needed so much dang support... we'll take the money."
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
and Red Hat contributes A LOT to open source too. If it wasn't for Red Hat there would be no "Linux" as we know it.
IBM too. Red Hat #1 and IBM #4 in terms of corporate development of Linux. All together 75% of kernel development is corporate.
https://www.computerweekly.com...
a bunch of semen gargling faggots run redhat and IBM
Like security assessments and getting FIPS-140 Java Crypto working.
Dealing with the government for that stuff is a pain. Happy to let them
do it.
Marx assumed that all the gravitation effects in the solar system existed in (sun,planet) interactions. His theory falls apart as soon as you add a single moon. Even without moons, (planet,planet) interactions are often strong enough to really mess up space probe navigation.
Imagine if Newton was smart enough to figure out the inverse square law concerning (sun,planet) but wasn't smart enough to conclude that the same law applied to (planet,apple). Congratulations, you've got Marx, where the smallest scale of interaction is (overclass,underclass). My how the sun in the heavens exploits, exploits, exploits.
And this trick still works. Point to any sufficiently bright and shiny object ($34B will do nicely) and then cue the universal chorus of shade woo.
Plus, don't get me started about Mercury taking more than his share.
Plutos, unite!
Sometimes one can phrase obvious consequences of a discovery as "specific practical methods." For example, if the discovery is that lack of substance A in the human body causes disease B, the discoverer might claim to have invented supplementation with A as a method of treating B.
If it does not then we need GPL4. No profit can be made from our long hours. When I started contributing it was to get back at Microsoft. back in the mid 80s microsoft was going to pay me for my sound driver code. back in the day the 80286 and 80386 PCs were so slow that even with interrupt driven software you would hear a popping noise. Even more pronounced if you did realtime mixing. I created a driver that used "Ping Pong" buffers and was software intrrupt driven. When the buffer was 70% empty I would fill it up. When the buffer was empty I would play the "other buffer" and trigger a refill during the same. The result was clean sound. I also wrote a realtime mixer. Real simple.. take buffer a, shift buffer a to the right, XOR with buffer b.. it was wild, you could hear two digitized sounds at the same time. The code evolved to mix 8 sound files at once. On 80386 hardware. 3 on 80286 hardware. .01Cent per copy of Windows sold. We exchanged NDAs and I had signed the royalty agreement. I never saw a penny.
Microsft was going to pay me
So I wrote code for OS/2 Warp, and when Linux came about, it was a no brainer. I dumped Microsoft and IBM. So you know what code I wrote...
Now redhat is screwing us. All of my code will NOT be available to redhat.. ever. I hope there is a way to have my code retracted from the Redhat release.
Maybe Richard Stalman would have some input regarding this.
I was able to get in on Red Hat's IPO because I made a small contribution to net-snmp a couple years before. I didn't get rich, but it was a nice bonus that year.
Is it bad that there are paid jobs and companies with market value which exist because of open source software?
Red Hat got bought because of its customer base and revenue stream just like any other company.
Like MS buying Minecraft for the revenue stream
Like Disney buying Lucas/Star Wars for the revenue stream
Follow the money as it is said, most organizations and altruistic jobs/causes are about the money to be made...
- Environmental scientists research to expand science and, never stated in the media, to get the income from a research job
- Lobbyists lobby politicians because they get paid to do so
- Laws are made to achieve cause X but also to let companies sell product.... Like how Freon, the AC refrigerant, was supposed to be bad for the environment, so the patent holder lobbied to have it banned just before the patent expired and replaced with a patented new coolant owned by the same company....
Make a business selling something that's free then offload for 34 billion... Why didn't I think of that idea ;)
I am fine with programmers who are willing to contribute to open source projects without any compensation. I am fine with companies like Red Hat that find a way to make money off the generous contributions of others. I am fine with companies paying their employees to work on open source projects that will benefit the company.
What irks me are all the 'open source zealots' out there who insist that anything closed source is some kind of evil thing. If you build something and take great personal risk to get it ready for market, you are often portrayed as some kind of 'greedy capitalist' if you want others who get value from your product to actually pay you something directly for your efforts. You built it. You own it. If you want to charge something for it, then you better make sure it adds more value than the price you are charging for it. Just don't let anyone tell you that you are less than human for not wanting to just give away the fruits of your labors.
I make six figures and don't live in super expensive socialist California which means I'm really well off. Most software developers around me have also been paid well. If you aren't making money from your "open source" efforts and your project is actually being utilized your doing something wrong. The people who make the most are always those who are best at business whether or not they are in business or software development work. It's up to you to negotiate or develop a business model around your project. If your not don't be surprised when you get paid pittance or nothing at all for your work.
I've also helped one small project with a naive developer resume his project (and some others...). He was naive, young, and being taken advantage of. He started off doing what he wanted being paid pittance for his work by a start-up. Then he got paid nothing when the start-up went under and had to move on to other poorly paid work. This because he didn't know how to build a business from his efforts. I came in a few years later and helped him resurrect this very important if small project and build a business model around it that could sustain his efforts. He went from making $10 / hour (something like $20 / hr as a contractor, but less after taxes) not being able to work on his open source project to making decent money via reviving it and he now is pulling in around $45,000 or so annually. Which isn't bad considering where he lives and how much time and effort he puts into maintaining it. This year I got him a $200,000 bonus too. Basically a new house in New Hampshire!
It's decent money considering he's not living in silicon valley and the average income here is much less than this figure (still a nice area though). He has a nice house, cars, health insurance, travel expenses, etc, already and he's fairly young (27). Keep in mind it's also a fairly tiny one-man show with not much general appeal or opportunity for funding- but if you can achieve this with that then there shouldn't be any issues developing a funding stream for a more significant project with full time developers.
If you haen't made it rich maybe it's time to make some changes rather than blaming other people.
This article is from 2012. If you want up-to-date stats see LWN's regular reports, e.g. here is a recent one for 4.18:
https://lwn.net/Articles/76069...
(Though Red Hat is indeed still right up near the top.)
Thank you, #3 and #9 now, but wow Intel #1, Linux Foundation #2.
Unfortunately, it also requires Lennart Poettering and whichever spaztard messed up Gnome.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Are you forgetting or just unaware that the FSF used to charge hundreds of dollars to purchase copies of their software (which then gave you all the rights to copy and redistribute)? Making money has always been allowed and encouraged.
Sure, but that was just the FSF charging for the mag tapes and gas money for station wagon ;-)
Intel is at #1 because they are scrambling to fix Meltdown and Spectre.
And just like you don't have time to sell to large companies, they don't have time to buy from you alongside a thousand other open source creators, one at a time.
That is right, they don't buy from me. Because I don't ask for money. They couldn't buy from me, even if they wanted to. I'd just point them to gitlab or github or sourceforge or my own website, depending on what it is they want and wherever I put it.
And I'm fine with that, otherwise I wouldn't have done it.
But distributors like SuSE and RedHat were controversial from the beginning because even if the legalese fineprint said something else, they did everything in their power to create the impression that they were selling software.
I personally don't have a problem with the business model, save that it could be a bit more honest, but this particular blurb someone in PR wrote is just... stupid, insulting and false.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If anybody is using 1100 NPM packages, stop programming shit NOW. Go home.
I develop for open source projects. I also make my bread and butter from Cisco Call Manager. Call Manager btw is a Linux based PBX. Linux' success is my success. I have no reason to stop contributing to open source in my spare time as I see fit.
Red Hat sells a service to businesses, thats why they get paid! they then take those profits and hire developers to contribute to open source projects that will further enhance their bottom line and as a side benefit provide useful code into the open source realm. All of the code that Red Hat produces is also open source so that other developers can then use it and build upon it in their own projects.
The idiotic thing is that this is an article ANYWHERE! Anyone who is a developer should understand the business model of Red Hat, in so much as that they sell support for the operating system (including custom made code for certain applications). How could any developer create code and not even bother to read and comprehend the license that they are releasing their code under?
Didn't RedHat offer the open source community some kind of inside deal on stock for their IPO? I remember something about it.
If true, it's not Red Hat's fault if you sold early
- Sig
And you folks complained about Apple's 30% cut - at least their developers got paid.
In the words of Oprah, You get nothing, and you get nothing, and you get nothing...
--XYZZY--
If they are making enough money to throw some kickbacks upstream and don't do it, then I find it not moral.
> Did you get paid for your contributions?
Why yes, yes I did. By Red Hat, by Intel, by Apple and by IBM. What comes around, goes around.
Time to grab a copy of CENTOS before IBM does what they do best.. lock everyting up in a support contract and kill off whatever they can?
got "the letter" to open source contributors; made a nice profit.
Red Hat and Linux has given me a six figure salary career, going on close to 20 years now. The only money I ever gave RedHat directly was for Red Hat Linux 5 (the 1997 release, not RHEL 5) and that was only because downloading 5 CDs of software over a pay-per-minute 56k modem would have been insane.
I discovered Red Hat Linux 0.9 in '94 in a University lab. Red Hat became my distro of choice and learning ground for the next 5 years, as I suffered through the BSOD years of Win 95 and Win 98 in a software engineering job in a windows shop. In 2000, my Linux proficiency led directly to a job in security engineering on SunOS systems at GTEI (formerly BBN). My boss had struggled to find anyone with the other required skills and SunOS experience, but knew from my Linux skills that I'd have the aptitude to succeed.
Two jobs later, I'm still doing security on linux-based solutions. RHEL and CentOS remain my gotos for that, usually with Fedora on my workstations. In a strange twist, that boss ended up at Red Hat. I hope he's still there and getting paid now. He was awesome.
Over the years I have used several distros including Slackware, Suse, Mandrake, Gentoo, and Debian; but I always seem to end up running more Red Hat based systems than everything else put together.
A big part of that is due to rpms and yum (now dnf). Whilst other distros have similar offerings, I find rpms easy to use, and pretty complete in functionality. As an example, I was once tasked with providing a list of licenses in use across an entire engineering department as part of a corporate due diligence during an acquisition. Getting a list of every rpm's license was a one-liner. Getting that same information from the .debs on a Debian-based system was nigh impossible.
My linux challenges today are far different than they were back in '97. Soundcards just work. Graphics cards just work. I wish that systemd and Gnome would too. :p
I turned the PHBs at RH in to the feds, and still made a lot from the IPO.
Yeah, it was me. Next time, don't steal.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
it was about 7 year old me, having to scour the local BBS for software, or use something pirated from a bulletin board when i was 12, just to learn basic things like programming a data structure and reading a file.
that is no longer necessary. because of people like me. so fuck off with your money. most of its covered in blood anyways.
Intel have done a lot of work on the parts of the kernel that interface with their hardware. Graphics drivers, networking, ....
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Y'all can promote how RedHat help the community, contributed and such, but they are still a company. Like their marketing, support, developers, bizdev and such steered companies away from obvious, EASY solutions to RHT solutions needing complex and expensive support contracts.
"Working with these organizations requires a sales and marketing team, a customer support organization, a finance back-office, and lots of other "business stuff" in addition to technology. Red Hat has had that stuff, but you haven't. "
No they don't craigslist runs just fine. It all depends who has a stake in the product and complexity and solution do not go hand in hand. Politics and one's pay play a huge part in complexity and the "way of doing business". Lack of leadership and good mgmt is what RedHat fill as most businesses are fairly simple compared to Amazon, Google, or MS, which... by then, roll their own Linux.
Debian has been FOSS and cruises along fine. RedHat was a money grab when F/OSS was bitcoin, and ended up with the same old IBM model: big support contracts no one needs.
Worse than getting $0 for the sale of Red Hat, the Linux community got SystemD, thanks to Red Hat.
Sorry, after all these years I still don't understand why so many people are willing to work for free. Somebody is going to make millions (or maybe billions) off your work, why not ensure some of that gets shared with you?
They are providing support. You don't get answers from open source authors typically when asking them for support (no one's ever asked me for help by the way).
I just like that anyone can download my stuff and use it from anywhere in the world, myself included.