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.'"
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Kimball's rocks, don't they?
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I love that I'm not the only one who knew exactly which office was being referred to. :)
Congratulations, IBM! I knew you could do it! (Score:1)
oh...
Congratulations, Google! I knew you could do it! (Score:2)
oh...
Apple....?
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Have to agree.
And the support fees are mandatory- no way to download a copy of RHEL from them without signing up to pay.
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They should go back to a freely downloadable, but unsupported version. Compared to enterprise level support from other vendors(Unix, Windows, etc) I don't think their pricing is that bad, but an easily accessible free version with no support would alleviate the headaches of waiting for CentOS and others to keep up. Fedora is nice, but it's too far removed from the main Red Hat release and can be unstable.
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They should go back to a freely downloadable, but unsupported version.
It's called Fedora.... Also known as the upstream source for RHEL.
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You seem to have missed the last part of that:
Fedora is nice, but it's too far removed from the main Red Hat release and can be unstable.
They're similar and in a couple years RHEL will resemble Fedora today, but by that point Fedora will be quite different too.
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And... that's the whole point of Fedora vs RHEL. This has been discussed everywhere for years.
Users want something free - thats Fedora. OEMs and Vendors want something with long term support and accountability - which costs money. Thats RHEL, which you pay for.
All the companies that switch to CentOS, fine with me - but play nice, and buy at least 1 support contract/license from Red Hat. It's a nice way of saying thanks to the main company doing all the hard work.
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All the companies that switch to CentOS, fine with me - but play nice, and buy at least 1 support contract/license from Red Hat. It's a nice way of saying thanks to the main company doing all the hard work.
That's a way of saying thanks for seeding my yum-rhn-plugin/reposync that updates untold numbers of unsubscribed RHEL systems. Not that using CentOS is mooching any less.
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You seem to have missed the last part of that:
Fedora is nice, but it's too far removed from the main Red Hat release and can be unstable.
They're similar and in a couple years RHEL will resemble Fedora today, but by that point Fedora will be quite different too.
Well, businesses could run a Fedora from a few years ago. That should be like RHEL today, right?
I think CentOS is a better option if you are looking for "free as in beer".
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> It's called Fedora.... Also known as the crowd-sourced beta testing for RHEL.
FTFY
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They should go back to a freely downloadable, but unsupported version.
Wait...
Their OS works
They get 28% year-over-year
What's wrong with the way they do business?
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They should go back to a freely downloadable, but unsupported version.
Wait... Their OS works They get 28% year-over-year
What's wrong with the way they do business?
It's a philosophical, not a business argument.
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Of course it'd be good for you, the question Red Hat will ask is "What's in it for us?" That it doesn't have support isn't going to stop people from blaming "the red hat server" when things go to hell, maybe they'll get a few incident support fees but very little else. On the other hand they're likely to lose a lot of basic support agreements from companies who bought it because some PHB has heard of Red Hat, but never CentOS. There's a reason Fedora has its own name and brand and it's not Red Hat Linux any
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I believe OpenSuse is much closer to SLE[S|D] than Fedora is to RHEL, though I could be mistaken. I've certainly seen "trial" SLED DVDs floating around, which will prompt (but not require) you to buy a support contract and such when installed.
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That's why CentOS [centos.org] exists. It's Red Hat's SRPMs (which they distribute to stay GPL-compliant), without the Red Hat branding, built themselves and give away freely. So if you don't want support but do want something that's basically identical to RHEL, use that. And yes, this can be used on a large scale if needed.
What RHEL really caters to are the CTOs or small business owners who have heard from the trade magazines and their techies that Linux is a great tool, but are too stuck in the Microsoft mindset to th
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To fair, the support is pricey, but it's good. For the SOHO shop that is using a Linux box or two as a back end for their Windows and/or Mac workstations, they'll answer the straight easy "how do I do $thing in Linux" all day. For the big boys the basic support people will escalate to engineers for helping you optimize kernels, fix complex issues. I've used their support for some very tricky issues in clustering and HPC, they've always been willing to help and usually pointed me int eh right direction ev
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Have to agree.
And the support fees are mandatory- no way to download a copy of RHEL from them without signing up to pay.
You can download a 60-day trial of RHEL here, just make a free RHN account first.
https://www.redhat.com/wapps/eval/index.html?evaluation_id=1008 [redhat.com]
It doesn't time out and you can use it forever you just won't receive updates after 60 days. You can also compile your own updates from the freely available SRC rpms like all the other RHEL clones do should you choose.
I stand corrected. (Score:2)
I'd always balked at the signing up stage.
Thanks for the pointer!
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RHEL support fees don't work for me, but I am OK with waiting for CentOS. I don't need cutting-edge Linux, just a distro that doesn't choke on a tarball. For those things that truly need to be absolutely current, I'll go get the source code and install the old fashioned way.
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They are a billion dollar open source company because enough people pay their ridiculous fees.
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.
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hey, i've got four kids to feed!
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> So what happened to number five?
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Why should those engineers being paid at all? Why aren't people from the community volunteering their time?
Why should anyone volunteer their time to a commercial organisation?
A first for Slashdot! (Score:1)
Well done! No-one else will be reporting this amazing milestone for about a year!!!
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Sorry, it's 6 months to their end of FY 2012, not 12, the point by which they expect to have made $1B in a FY.
Which software (Score:3)
Re:Which software (Score:5, Informative)
They predict that by 2013 non-OS software will grown to almost half the revenue.
Source [redhat.com].
Middleware (likely JBoss) will be the majority of the non-OS software.
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their Linux OS isn't really anything special, compared to other distros or even [gasp!] Windows server,
What are you talking about? It's unfakeable.
Seriously though, it is a very solid distribution with great support for far less money than you would pay for other *nix. And your "Windows server" comparison made me laugh.
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Free as in... (Score:1)
Impossible!!! (Score:1)
There's no money in open source software!! It's it's not protected, encrypted, DRM'd, closed source, there can be no profit in it and everyone will pirate and never pay!!
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And how much of that comes from vending/supporting "their" software (vs. selling hardware and taking cuts of everyone else's content and software that is sold via their "store")?
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Well, if you actually had a clue you'd know that was true.
RedHat's worth and value is in the investments it made from its IPO sales, the majority of their income is from those investments, not from OSS.
If they still had to depend on the software side of the business to pay for everything they would have went out of business shortly after their IPO.
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Without Red Hat there would be no CentOS, and even with Red Hat doing the lions share of the work, the CentOS folks have a hell of a time getting updates, patches, security fixes out.
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At the risk of feeding a troll, it is most definitely open source because you can download the entire source code (from RedHat), modify it if you want, and roll your own distribution with it. Which is exactly what Scientific Linux and CentOS does.
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As usual, it depends on your definition of "free". The term "Red Hat" is indeed a trademark, and other people are not permitted to use it. Hence you can't reproduce packages that use that term without removing the term. Does that violate any definition of "open source"? Probably not: OSI's Open Source Definition [opensource.org] says nothing about trademarks. I can't think of a single open source definition that excludes trademarks; in fact, the FSF have even explicitly declared that the use of trademarks is compatible wit [gnu.org]
So, bad economy is good for open source? (Score:2)
So, that answers that question people were making by 2008? A bad economy is indeed good for open source.
My most recent guess was the oposite.
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The majority of RedHat's income is from investments, not software, so saying a bad economy is good for OSS is misleading at best. OSS isn't wants keeping them afloat. Good investments during a time when everyone else made a bunch of shitty ones is whats keeping them going.
Red Hat investment income (Score:2)
The majority of RedHat's income is from investments, not software...
Red Hat's Statement of Cash Flows [yahoo.com] says otherwise. Over the most recent 12 months reported Red Hat had $23,378,000 in investment income against $107,278,000 in Net Income and $909,277,000 in Revenue. That works out to about 2.5% of Red Hat's income coming from investments. Last time I checked, 2.5% does not constitute a "majority".
Of course they're number one... (Score:1)
...among "open source" companies. Because their model is as close to a closed-source company as they can be without violating licenses. Want a non-paid copy of their OS? Sure, but we're going to make it hard for you to find, and you'd better be able to compile everything from source yourself.
Note: I'm not knocking Red Hat here. I think they're actually smart, and I think they're successful because they operate more as a profit-seeking enterprise than an idealistic "lets make a few bucks while we change the
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Cool! Now, when will they get bought out? (Score:1)
And what will happen to all those "defensive" patents that they've been filing?
If you obtain software patents, you're the enemy. No exceptions, no compromises.
Mr. Whitehurst, take a bit of that money (Score:2)
the flames, the heat, the need (Score:1)
As a Fedora fanboy (let me be clear about my position here) AND a RedHat (RHT) stockholder (money where my mouth is) let me point out that:
1) Red Hat announced last year that they were approaching the 1 billion mark and hoped to pass it this year
2) This announcement is merely a prognostication that they will accomplish that this year
3) their stocks have been a consistent and strong investment for me (as opposed to AMD, various solar energy and battery companies).
4) Red Hat is a company, they are doing what