First Billion Dollar Open Source Software Vendor 75
head_dunce writes "Red Hat is doing very well in this economy. Total revenue and subscription revenue for this quarter is up 28% year-over-year. Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat said, 'Based on the strong first half results, we believe Red Hat remains well positioned to finish fiscal 2012 as the first billion dollar open source software vendor.'"
Re:Of course..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Have to agree.
And the support fees are mandatory- no way to download a copy of RHEL from them without signing up to pay.
Re:Of course..... (Score:5, Interesting)
The support fees only appear "ridiculous" when considered out of context. Red Hat is in the market of providing premium support solutions for enterprise. How much do you think similar companies charge for premium enterprise support? IBM? Oracle? Microsoft? Red Hat has a high value support proposition in the Linux industry: they have skilled engineers with expertise across the entire Linux stack. If you have a support contract query that requires escalating, then they are able to do it. If you have a problem with a low-level kernel issue, then Red Hat can provide kernel engineers. If you have an issue with the GCC toolchain, they have some of the people who maintain GCC who can work on it. You have a Java or JBoss problem? They have people who can do that.
And here's the big deal - if you have an interaction issue, where, say, JBoss performs badly on a particular series of kernel builds, then they have people who can work on that from both ends. How many other Linux distributions can say that they can offer support services across the entire Linux software stack, from compiler to kernel to Java Enterprise server, supported by the engineers who actually wrote and maintained the upstream projects? That is why enterprises are happy to pay Red Hat so much for a premium support package.