Red Hat Support Continues To Flourish 215
ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:3, Funny)
What exactly do you think the support folks do?
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older, so the joke is no longer, 'We're all single and can't get laid.' The joke is now, 'We're all married and can't get laid.' Please do keep up.
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:2, Funny)
Apparently he thinks they sit around waiting for things to go wrong, like the typical Microsoft admin.
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:3, Funny)
Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older, so the joke is no longer, 'We're all single and can't get laid.' The joke is now, 'We're all married and can't get laid.' Please do keep up.
Soon a growing portion will be "This page was bookmarked on my dad's computer; what does 'laid' mean?!"
Re:How to make a million in FLOSS: (Score:1, Funny)
"Can someone point out an example showing me that I'm wrong?"
You won't get any examples. The standard groupthink on here, especially coming from student, recent grads and lecturers, none of which have had any exposure to the real world, is that your business model should go something such as:
1) come up with idea you think might work in the market
2) spend lots of time and effort developing idea
3) once your product looks like it might be competitive on the market, then some behemoth such as IBM will take notice and start offering support to large corporates
4) if you are really lucky then you might get offered a job! OMGZ a JOB!!!
4) is considered to be some really great reward. You see, many on here constantly whinge and whine about the man keeping them down, how the PHB's get all the $ while they work away, how the marketdroids (insert whatever derogatory term) get to go on alcohol fuelled lunches while nobody wants anything to do with them. Yet suggest something such as they should start their own business and you will be mocked "how can you possibly compete with the IBMs etc?". Well - if your business model is to give the IBMs your software for free and hope they offer you a job then no, you won't make much money from it. You will keep making your small developer salary still whinging about how the business types make all the $ with your idea. If these same people had bothered to put some thought into it rather than blindly going "omgz i want to offer teh open source!!!" then they might have made some decent $.