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Red Hat Software Businesses Software Linux

Red Hat Posts Its Best Quarter Yet 355

Posted by CowboyNeal from the more-than-just-hanging-in-there dept.
wrinkledshirt writes "Anybody remember the days when the naysayers said you couldn't build a viable business model centered around open-source software? After Red Hat's 2nd quarter report, well, insert(&mouth, FOOT); is all I have to say. Okay, okay, the hubris of a Linux zealot aside, the numbers look pretty good. Revenue for the quarter was $28 million, with net income at $3 million. You'd think SCO's blathering would have damaged them, but they're actually up the last couple of quarters after posting some net losses in previous quarters." Kudos to Red Hat. They must be doing something right.
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Red Hat Posts Its Best Quarter Yet More

Red Hat Posts Its Best Quarter Yet

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  • hey... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spytap ( 143526 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:28AM (#7001890)
    I just bought a package...that means i helped!

  • It's the distro I use (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ODD97 ( 645414 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:29AM (#7001900) Homepage
    But I haven't paid for it. I'm still using the demo account.

    Sure, it doesn't act like "real" Linux for a lot of things, but it's very painless to install and very easy to run. It's almost to the point that a non-geek could run it.

    And sure, they haven't directly contributed much in the way of new code, but they're been a big cash cow for a number of project developing groups.

    Go RedHat!

    • I use Redhat myself (Score:3, Insightful)

      by HanzoSan ( 251665 )


      I'm very pro Redhat, they make the best version of Linux in my opinion. Gentoo seems interesting but ridiculous to setup, Debian is too old and would require I upgrade every component after I install it, Redhat is easy to install and fairly up to date, its also easy to upgrade.

      I dont very much care for the RPM system, I hate dependencies, I dont really like everything about Redhat, but it works so I use it.

      Redhat has contributed new code, they are doing a good job at improving functionality. RPM while I

      • Re:I use Redhat myself (Score:5, Informative)

        by digitalunity ( 19107 ) <digitalunity @ y a h oo.com> on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:45AM (#7002313) Homepage
        For a RedHat user, you sure don't seem to like much about the way it's set up. You sound like a hands-on, technically inclined person. IMO, you should consider Slackware if you decide to try anything else. It is by far the most stable of all the distributions out there and if you know anything about the workings of Linux, you will find it very easy. All of the packages are up to date and easy to install.
        I don't personally like RPM either, so rpm2tgz is my friend. It does include RPM if you ever need it though. The BSD style init scripts are easy to configure. The file placement scheme is very well thought out, making modifications, program install/updates, whatever a breeze. The distro setup program is very easy to use making package selection a no-brainer, as well as setting up networking, pretty console fonts, whatever else you need.

        For anyone who want's to get into the inner workings of Linux and really understand what's going on 'under the hood' so to speak, Slackware is a good place to start. It's easy to use, yet flexible enough to get real work done. What more could you ask for?
        </plug>

    • Re:It's the distro I use (Score:5, Insightful)

      by innosent ( 618233 ) <jmdority AT gmail DOT com> on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:42AM (#7001964)
      Exactly, it may not be a person's favorite distribution, but RedHat has done, and continues to do a lot for Linux. Personally, I use Gentoo, but I'm happy to see a company succeed that puts as much legal, economic, and coding effort into Linux as RedHat does. It seems like RedHat and SuSe are behind a lot of good media coverage, and are usually the first ones to step up when needed (SuSe in Europe, and RedHat in North America, like in the SCO case).

      Sure, they sell a free product, but what they're really selling is updates, pretty manuals, and their continued commitment to Linux, and support. Without RedHat and SuSe, Linux would probably be three years behind where it is now, and you wouldn't see as many companies switching to Linux, and as many Linux stories in the news.

    • Re:It's the distro I use (Score:5, Insightful)

      by minus9 ( 106327 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:57AM (#7002023) Homepage
      "And sure, they haven't directly contributed much in the way of new code"

      Yeah Redhat and its employees like Alan Cox have hardly contributed anything!
    • Sure, it doesn't act like "real" Linux for a lot of things,

      Examples? Gentoo diverges most radically from the "real" Linux way of doing things, followed by Slackware. Red Hat is pretty conservative regarding this stuff, i.e. it uses sysvinit and does pretty much everything in the way things used to be done.
      • Ahem, Slackware is very much old-school. A lot of it, especially the scripts are very obviously BSD-ish, which would make it exactly 'the way things used to be done'. Anyone coming from a commercial Unix would find the transition easiest with Slackware. You are right in that Gentoo is a little off the wall, but Slackware is very traditional in many aspects.
        • You are right in that Gentoo is a little off the wall, but Slackware is very traditional in many aspects.

          Yes, but not "Linux-traditional".
          • Since slackware is the oldest surviving distro around you could almost say it is the definition of "Linux-traditional".... You probably mean something like "Linux-popular"

            Jeroen
            • You probably mean something like "Linux-popular"

              "Traditional" implies a degree of popularity. It's the way most distributions do things, the way that is taught at various Linux courses...

              But this is all semantics.

          • Re:It's the distro I use (Score:3, Insightful)

            by schon ( 31600 )
            Yes, but not "Linux-traditional".

            Yes, "Linux-traditional"

            Since the Linux startup grew from BSD-style Unix startup, Slackware IS the most "Linux-traditional".

            This is obvious to anyone who knows the roots of Linux.

  • Doesnt surprise me one bit. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HanzoSan ( 251665 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:31AM (#7001908) Homepage Journal


    I think the old model of selling products is dead anyway, its dead in the music industry, its dead in the software industry. Theres only so much software you can sell to people, what? You think Microsoft's model would work in the third world? You are wrong.

    Redhat actually has a better long term model, a service model which will work despite the changes in economy. The service model basically says, take our software for free, but if you want help using this software, sign up for support.

    This will work great for Operating Systems, Microsoft could easily give away Windows and charge for support, antivirus, upgrades, etc. China is now moving toward Linux, when big governments such as these move toward Linux, this means the revenue stream grows x10, government has the money to buy support, and they are the kind of customers who cannot afford to make mistakes and are likely to buy support.

    School systems also are the type of customers, businesses I think at least the small to medium sized businesses can use the support, the large businesses can hire their own experts.
    • Selling digital things may not be the best business model, but selling physical things and services is still going strong.

      I'm starting to be reminded of Larry Niven's comments on governments based on water monopolies. They retain power even though they have decayed, until an outsider comes along and makes them collapse. These business models based on content distribution, marketing and talent identification are getting long in the tooth!

    • Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hamster foo ( 697718 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @04:01AM (#7002038)
      Redhat's business model is certainly a success but with Microsoft posting $8.07 billion in revenue and $1.92 billion in net income, it's pretty ridiculous to say that selling software is dead. I'm sure record industry numbers would probably support that their industry while in a slump isn't exactly dead either. Both business models have a place and are not mutually exclusive.

      On another note, large corporations probably do more to support Redhat's business model than any of the other entities you listed. We have contracts with vendors for just about every product we use. Yes, we also have "experts" on staff, but vendors are called on quite a lot to deal with issues with hardware and software.
      • Here [microsoft.com] is the report those numbers come from if anybody is interested. Forgot to include a link in the previous post.
        • Here you can see that MS-Window and MS-Office pull in monopoly rents [sec.gov]. i.e. 4-5 times the free market price. With everything else losing money, any price cuts in those two are going to cut deeply. Thus the panic to spread expensive lock-in techologies (e.g. Palladium/ WMP9) and licenses (License 6).

          Given that software distribution can have nearly zero cost, RedHat, SuSe, Apple and others seem to have more viable model. Even the RIAA could learn from them, though for both Microsoft and RIAA, I think the

        • Interesting link ... Microsoft spends more on Marketing and Advertising than it does Research and Developement.

          • Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by clontzman ( 325677 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @10:13AM (#7004191) Homepage
            Before you get too excited, so does Apple:

            For the last quarter:

            Research and development: $120M/7.8% of net sales

            Selling, general, and administrative expenses: $299M/19.4% of net sales

            That includes some non-advertising, retail-related expenses, but it's almost 3x as much. All those commercials ain't cheap.

            Not that I'm saying that it's a bad thing -- I'm just saying that's it's probably true for pretty much any company.

            Source: Apple's 10-Q [corporate-ir.net]
      • with Microsoft posting $8.07 billion in revenue and $1.92 billion in net income, it's pretty ridiculous to say that selling software is dead

        What is dead, or walking wounded rather, is the ability to sell commodity software for the markups Microsoft is used to. In other words, Microsoft better get prepared for a world in which each copy of Windows brings in 10% of what it used to, and MS Office brings in 3%.
      • Red Hat says they are a service company, but their cap improved after they developed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In fact, it is a service: Red Hat downloads a bunch of free software avaliable on the internet, packages it and works hard to make it a stable platform for enterprises, backporting bugfixes for it for years (free software developers tend to make bugfixes only for their latest software, but you can't be on the bleeding edge because dependencies may break other applications, specially closed sour
        • Could *you* package a product stable enough to support an enterprise?

          The only way I could do so would be by using Debian stable. And the Red Hat Enterprise version is much friendlier (especially during the setup). Also the Red Hat edition has support for multiple raid partitions at various raid levels, and various other features that are more than a bit difficult to configure when starting from a vanilla Debian. (Mind you, I think the pricing is rediculous, but if that's what it takes to convince people

    • Re:Doesnt surprise me one bit. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2003 @04:03AM (#7002046)
      I think the old model of selling products is dead anyway

      95% of all software companies disagree, including giants like IBM and Microsoft. Considering the number of "support only" companies veruses the number of companies that sell both software and support wouldn't you say so?

      Redhat actually has a better long term model, a service model which will work despite the changes in economy.

      Think again my friend. If the economy TOTALLY went down the crapper Red Hat could be supported by dirt cheap armies of people who have used Linux for years. That and well, the source is out there so it's not too difficult to hire a couple coders and fix things yourself.

      and they are the kind of customers who cannot afford to make mistakes and are likely to buy support.

      First, I have heard Red Hat's support is horrific. Like it or not that's what people tell me. Second, if you can't afford to make mistakes, hire your own coders and sysadmins. What's easier, to sue someone and hope you win or fire a coder who breaks your super duper mission critical system?

      You have some truly "pie in the sky" ideas about how things work these days and how they'll work in the future. I appreciate your ideas but some of your statements are ludacris.

    • China is now moving toward Linux, when big governments such as these move toward Linux, this means the revenue stream grows x10, government has the money to buy support, and they are the kind of customers who cannot afford to make mistakes and are likely to buy support

      So it's up to China to advance the cause of OSS? You might want to have a look at their <sarcasm>altruistic</sarcasm> actions during the "Great Leap Forward", "Cultural Revolution", at Tianenmen, and in Tibet... The PRC is not in

  • SCO Case (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You'd think SCO's blathering would have damaged them, but they're actually up the last couple of quarters after posting some net losses in previous quarters.

    -----------------

    So, wouldn't this actually hurt the Red Hat case? I mean I thought they were building it on the fact that all the SCO FUD was hurting buisness.

    • Re:SCO Case (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bobintetley ( 643462 )
      You'd think SCO's blathering would have damaged them

      You would think, but I think the SCO case has actually done more good than harm. Why? Listen to the publicity SCO are putting out - they are complaining that Linux is too good, it has all these enterprise features normally found in proprietary UNIX and their products and services can't compete with Linux-based companies out there offering similar services.

      I can just see IT managers out there going "has it? can it? It'll save me how much? I want som

    • Re:SCO Case (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Cooper_007 ( 688308 )
      I don't know what came over me, but for some reason I chose to RTFA. Sorry.

      to say it has not affected us would not be accurate; we continue to spend a lot of time with customers around this. Those who are sitting on the fence are using this as an excuse to continue to sit there

      It's rather silly to deny that it's costing them revenue, but I suppose it's a sign of a good business when they manage to deal with it and still post a profit in the process.

    • Re:SCO Case (Score:2, Insightful)

      by screenrc ( 670781 )
      How did you conclude that Red Hat was not
      damaged by SCO? Red Hat might have been damaged
      and its revenue could have been much higher,
      but because of the Microsoft/Sun funded anti-Linux
      campaing it did not show.


      Just because revenues are not lower, we
      can not conclude from this alone that they
      have not been damaged.

  • What's terrifying (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:34AM (#7001926)
    • Red Hat has a profit of $3 million this quarter
    • Microsoft has so much money they can afford to just randomly toss off $8 million this quarter as a random aside just becuse dropping that money into keeping SCO afloat might generate bad PR from one of their competitors.
    Implication: It is more than twice as profitable in the short term to become Microsoft's random lackey and wait for bribes from them than it is to make a useful, worthwhile product that competes with Microsoft.

    Is this a sign of a company with too much power? Nahhhhhh....


    • Anybody remember the days when the naysayers said you couldn't build a viable business model centered around open-source software?
      I don't think anyone is claiming that you can't make money with open source. The problem is that fewer companies will be profitable and those that are profitable will make less money.

      Look at it this way, Red Hat is the poster child for open source and everyone here thinks it's a huge success when they make piddily amounts of money. What about the >$100 million they have al
      • It is the job of the IT industry to enable their customers to do new things that weren't possible before, but also to make doing existing things cheaper.

        The fact that there's less money to be made from selling software is good news for the economy. (Roughly speaking, there are exceptions..) They should be spending their money on business intelligence, not on infrastructure that is roughly speaking "solved".

        • Re:What's terrifying (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Pharmboy ( 216950 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @08:06AM (#7002902) Journal
          It is the job of the IT industry to enable their customers to do new things that weren't possible before, but also to make doing existing things cheaper.

          The fact that there's less money to be made from selling software is good news for the economy. (Roughly speaking, there are exceptions..) They should be spending their money on business intelligence, not on infrastructure that is roughly speaking "solved".

          Nice point. Cheaper software makes it easier for small businesses to grow, and large businesses still need the support and tech's to impliment this software, so they hire, spend, develop, and contribute (via GPL). Anything that lowers the cost to start up and grow a business is good for jobs, good for the economy, good for consumers who now have more choice in the market place.

          Personally, I have a few rhn $60/year basic accounts (and they just gave me one for free). I also have servers that do not have the service yet but still benefit from it. It is nice to contribute toward the success of open sourced software in a small way, but more importantly, they offer a killer service that pays for itself in the first month or two.

          Being able to update several machines while I am at home, in a web browser, has allowed me to manage twice the servers. We use older servers, and tend to run ONE service on each box. Each box is configured as a backup server for another server, so we have great fallover protection. rhn is pretty stable and reliable. In almost two years, I have never had a problem with any updates it installs. You can even install and uninstall software remotely.

          They have done a few things I didn't like, like cutting off support for 6.x and 7.x too fast. It WAS dumb of them to allow their certificate to expire, causing a problem where everyone had to manually download and install two RPMs for up2date.

          But I can speak as a satisfied customer, overall. Their lowest tier of support (Basic Entitlement) is offering value and a very good service for many of us.
      • I don't think anyone is claiming that you can't make money with open source.

        Not now, they aren't.

    • Re:What's terrifying (Score:5, Funny)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:20AM (#7002260) Journal
      Linux Sucks! Open source is evil! The GPL causes cancer! GNU is un-{nation of your choice here}!

      Can I have $8 million now? (Yes, I have principles, and yes, I know exactly how much they're worth...)

  • 28 million ain't bad but.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dood ( 11062 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:36AM (#7001940)
    ... that's what Microsoft or Oracle make in a week. I don't think the OS business model is quite there, yet. ;)

    • Re:28 million ain't bad but.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @12:12PM (#7005536)
      Why not? Why does one have to earn millions of dollars each day for anything to be viable?

      Red Hat have said this themselves before. They do not believe that they will ever be a cash cow like Microsoft, but they think they can make a pretty decent living for a number of people. Why some people bought into the idea that they would take over from Microsoft beats me.

  • Ok that's one. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MisterFancypants ( 615129 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:38AM (#7001951)
    On this thread, there seems to be a lot of speculation going on about how OSS business models can be successful based on the success of one company.

    I have no specific opinion on how viable Open Source software sales can or should be, but a sample size of one success is hardly scientific proof that it is a viable business for others to get into...

    • I have no specific opinion on how viable Open Source software sales can or should be, but a sample size of one success is hardly scientific proof that it is a viable business for others to get into...
      Actually it is. It's working for RedHat so it's clearly a viable business model and it can work for others. Whether a specific company can execute it sucessfully is another matter but the business model is proven in the conditions that exist at this time.
      • It can work for others IF the market for Open source/Free software is large enough for more than one successful company, and that is a big if.
    • I have no specific opinion on how viable Open Source software sales can or should be, but a sample size of one success is hardly scientific proof that it is a viable business for others to get into...

      Yes, it makes no implications on how easy is to build a buisness around Open Source software, nor it illustrates what would be your chances of survival if you choose that path. It proves, however, that it possible to have a successful business selling OSS, which is fact of its own worth.

      Remember the hordes o

    • Re:Ok that's one. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jade E. 2 ( 313290 ) <slashdot@perlstorm . n et> on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:07AM (#7002225) Homepage
      Well, there are more companies than just Red Hat trying to make money off of Linux. Off the top of my head, I can name Transgaming, Suse, Mandrake, VA Software, Loki, Corel, and Lindows. I'm sure there are more, but I'm tired and very sick right now. But just using those companies, it's a pretty scary picture.

      Mandrake [mandrakesoft.com], Corel [corel.com], and VA Software [vasoftware.com] are all losing money. It's particularly impressive just how proud VA is that they've only lost 3.7 million in the first quarter this year, as opposed to the 9.8 million they lost first quarter last year. And you can't exactly claim it's starting losses either, all 3 have been around for years.

      Transgaming doesn't have financial information on their site, but they're a tiny (20 employees according to this June article [g2mpr.com]) private Canadian company. While that's great for those 20 people, I don't think selling access to freely distributable software and asking people not to distribute it is really a scalable business model. Lindows is apparently another small [lindows.com] (they claim 50 employees when trying to explain why they charge for click-n-run, who knows if it's accurate or not.) private [lindows.com] company.

      And Loki... [lokigames.com] You know.

      SUSE may be the only other major profitable company there, I can't really tell since they also don't list financial information. (At least, not on their English site, and not that I could find on their German site with Babelfish.)

      So, out of 8 Linux companies, one is (maybe 2 are, if SUSE is good.) large and profitable, 2 are small and private, 3 are large and losing money, and one already went bankrupt. Still not enough to really mean anything, but not quite as happy a picture as just considering Red Hat.

    • Well it atleast disproves the theory that you CANNOT make money on Opensource.
      A sample size of one is enough to disprove that. About long-term sustainability of this model, We'll see.

  • They need smarter vendors (Score:5, Funny)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:39AM (#7001953) Homepage Journal
    We, along with many other companies around here, have serious enterprise deployment of Redhat Linux and Oracle, thanks to their Redhat+Oracle enterprise initiatives.

    However their vendors don't seem to catch up with trend. I got many calls this week from a ASL sales asking for some clarification to our order:

    "Are you sure you don't need Arcserve for Linux for your tape drive?...dar? oh tar...tar? I really think you need Arcserve for schedule backup....cron?...."

    "Are you sure you don't need GEAR PRO for your CDRW drives? I believe you need it for writing some CDRW....I don't think there's any CDRW burning software bundled....what cdrecord?...."

    "Are you sure you don't need any antivirus sof"

     *DIALTONE*

  • Full figures here (Score:5, Informative)

    by dipfan ( 192591 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:52AM (#7002009) Homepage
    Red Hat's SEC filing is here [tenkwizard.com] and show, among other interesting facts, that RH has $307m in cash in the bank, which is more than enough to pay for the lawyers to fend off SCO.

    In many respects the six monthly figures are even better: a move from a loss of $6.3m in net income to a profit of $4.8m. Sure, a drop in the bucket compared with MS, but you've got to start somewhere.

    • and show, among other interesting facts, that RH has $307m in cash in the bank, which is more than enough to pay for the lawyers to fend off SCO.

      I don't agree, RH has more money sure, but SCO has nothing to lose, they are done, they know it. thats why all this started in the first place. RH is suppose to be a company of the future, how do they do that if they spend all thier money on a legal battle? while sco can just keep doing stock pumps and lobbying for cash to big corps?

  • Selling Free Software (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Friday September 19, 2003 @03:53AM (#7002012) Journal
    Someone else mentioned that the selling of Free Software is somehow an affront to the people writing Free Software. They are probably modded down to -1 Flamebait by now.

    They are wrong. When someone writes software and releases it under the GPL, they have set free another piece of software. It is really the most beautiful thing you could do for a piece of software, in fact. Without getting into the whole debate about whether it makes sense to anthropomorphize ideas and code by saying the overused phrase "Software wants to be Free", I will just sidestep the issue and say that as a moral developer I believe that software should be Free.

    I didn't always feel this way. I used to think that software that I wrote belonged to me as a result of my thinking about it and transcribing my thoughts into Emacs. But this is wrongheaded thinking, and I was shown so by the FSF. It boils down to the fact that once I release my code from my brain it ceases to be mine. Whose is it, you ask. Well, if it doesn't belong to me, then it certainly can't belong to you either. It exists on its own as a Free entity.

    Software makers use the artificial method of copyright to recapture this software and to claim ownership of it. This is not unlike the slave traders of old. I would go on here with the slave trader analogy because it is so completely apt, but experience in this forum shows me that most people here who claim to believe in the ideals of the Free Software Foundation simply do not understand the goals of the organization nor the fundamental reasons behind the movement.

    So why is selling Free Software okay? Free Software cannot sell itself. It is an inanimate object and thus needs a broker to handle transactions for it. The broker can be as simple as a roommate copying a CD ISO or as involved as a complete corporation dedicated to distributing and supporting the software. Because the software is Free, it can go anywhere and do anything, but of course it needs someone to help it along.

    Selling Free Software is good for Free Software. It is nothing more than a person or company taking a small fee for introducing the Free Software package to a new friend.

    • SLAVE TRADING? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Stu Charlton ( 1311 )

      I would like to honestly point out something that seems to be often missed by free software advocates and is a major reason why the free software argument has had a difficult time politically.

      You have an opinion about what software becomes when it leaves your head - that the information is "freed". The world at large has a very different perspsective on that, they view it as intellectual property.

      Who is "right" or "wrong" objectively is for philosophers or saints to decide. In politics, the question i
      • In politics, the question is never, "who is right", the question is one of "what works" to progress society?

        "What works" is a great question to ask. Much more productive than asking "what's right".

        Ummm.... but exactly what does it have to do with today's politics?
  • "Red Hat has defended its business model against a claim by the SCO Group yesterday that its dependence on open-source software development was unsustainable in the long term. " Hah! http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/os/story/0,200004 8630,20276904,00.htm

  • kudos? maybe, but not for making money (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 19, 2003 @04:04AM (#7002054)

    Cowboy Neal wrote:

    "
    Kudos to Red Hat. They must be doing something right."

    Uh, because success is measured in dollars, right? In that case: kudos to Microsoft. They must be doing something right. Kudos to Enron. They must have done something right. Kudos to penis-enlargement spammers. They must be doing something right.

    "Making money" is not necessarily the same thing as "doing something right." Redhat may or may not deserve kudos - that's a separate issue - but if they do, it certainly isn't for having a bank account.

  • OT: So, how is SuSE doing? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ivi ( 126837 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @04:14AM (#7002089)

    Does anybody happen to know how SuSE
    - with its "demo-mode" CD-ROM d'load
    (only...) is doing, ie compared with
    RedHat, financially?

    TIA

    • Re:OT: So, how is SuSE doing? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      SuSE also allows FTP installation of its latest distribution. It is a common misaprehension that they only supply "demo-mode" CDs.

    • Re:OT: So, how is SuSE doing? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hughk ( 248126 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @08:00AM (#7002857) Journal
      Suse is a German public company limited by shares (AG), but it isn't stock exchange listed so the accounting disclosure rules are negligiable. Unless they decide to list there is unlikely to be more information and the high tech market sector is dead.

      German corporate taxes are painful so the tendancy is to minimise profites. When Germany's Neuer Markt was alive, companies could pay taxes according to their books filed under German law (HGB) but publish results according to IAS or US-GAAP. The tax man was held at bay by the agreements that supported disclosure in the Neuer Markt. Now there is no such segment and the tax man is very hungry - so any figures published will understate profits.

      However, from the word going around, Suse aren't doing at all badly. They have always gone for a more corporate image which makes them appealing to big business. RH's hacker culture counts against them on this even though they have been very successfully climbing up market.

  • I'm still waiting for the renewal of RedHat's RHL announcement or whatever it will be called. Its page [redhat.com] still only states:

    Red Hat wants to thank the community for embracing this new project. We have received a lot of interest, comments, and questions, which have resulted in us rethinking some of our initial plans.

    Some things we are working on before we relaunch are:

    • Collaborating with existing projects to avoid duplication of effort
    • Incorporating community suggestions and feedback

    • Re:RHL Announcement? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jensend ( 71114 )
      The project is on hold, largely because a lot of clueless lusers thought the shift was a perfect opportunity to flood redhat's development mailing lists and ask stupid questions. Redhat is going to wait until after their next release to try again.

      I think this is one of the main problems large projects have right now. Mozilla's bugzilla, the OpenOffice.org mailing lists, and many of the other primary communication means of large projects are being flooded with people who aren't developing for the project an
  • Well to make such an amzing progress takes effort. And they pay their programmers pretty well too ! Most of them have the luxuries of a nice car & home.

    They deserve to be where they are right now, the system they have adopted (which has both programmers & volunteers working on RHL) seems to be working really well. That leaves us wondering why haven't the others followed a similar approach & if they did, have they been as successful as RedHat ?

  • SEC filing (Score:3, Funny)

    by glassesmonkey ( 684291 ) * on Friday September 19, 2003 @04:51AM (#7002190) Homepage Journal
    • SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
      • FORM 8-K
      CURRENT REPORT
      PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF
      THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934
      • Date of Report : September 18, 2003

      • Red Hat, Inc.

    • Sales to approximately 26,000 subscriptions
    • ???
    • Gross margins increased to 74% (profit)
  • they're not there yet, but it would be nice if they get to the point where they can give back dividends. a tech company giving out dividends. that would be another way for them to stand out.

  • Why the bigger numbers? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pros_n_Cons ( 535669 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @05:40AM (#7002299)
    Some things I'm about to say might be alittle harsh but Slashdot needs to take its medicine.
    First does anyone remember when Redhat9 came out, a huge selling point for them was that you could beat the rush and get RH 9 a week early if you signed up for support? An aweful lot of people signed up for that (including myself) . so many infact it ended up killing thier servers speed to something around 5k. But guess what. Slashdot posted bit torrent within the first hour happy to offer non paying customers a better solution. So how many people will be buying support this time around do you think? Not as many I'll bet.

    If Slashdot is always talking about morals and doing whats right with everything from patents to software. Why can't they allow a company that has argueably did more or atleast as much for linux then any other single company to earn a buck for just one week? Thats all folks. It's time we start showing as a community that we're not just a bunch of freeloaders, anarchists & hypocrites.
    • "freeloaders, anarchists & hypocrites."

      - Every person on the world likes the concept of gratis, why should "the community" (I dont like labeling, but..) be different.
      - Anarchism is a political view. It can be reasoned its the utmost freedom political view. It is however not something "bad"(C)
      - ALL of humankind are hypocrits.

      Its time people understand this "community" is NO DIFFERENT then others.

      Greetz /Dread

      (C)G. "dubya" Bush.
  • I'd be fascinated to see how much of RedHat's revenue really comes from the service sign-ups, and how much from OS /product sales. Everyone says that their service is the money-maker, but I want to see for myself what the breakdown is.

  • Stock up (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Friday September 19, 2003 @08:51AM (#7003261) Journal
    up 9 percent [yahoo.com]
    Not much of a surprise, I guess.

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