In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue 227
head_dunce writes "Now that Red Hat has officially posted more than a billion dollars in revenue, ($1.13 billion to be exact), the company's PR department sent this funny list of quotes predicting doom. For instance, 'We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market but I really don't think in the commercial market we'll see it in any significant way.' Bill Gates, 2001."
A Billion Thanks to the Open Source Community from (Score:5, Informative)
Trending: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/A-billion-thanks-to-the-open-source-community-from-Red-Hat?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook [redhat.com]
Thanks to both RedHat and OpenSource communities!
Red Hat also announced some donations (Score:5, Informative)
Red Hat also announced that they will be donating $100,000 to each of the following organizations; Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center and UNICEF Innovation Labs. http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/A-billion-thanks-to-the-open-source-community-from-Red-Hat
Awesome.. but some perspective (Score:5, Informative)
That's great that RH finally passed that mark... that's on top of the good news they've been announcing for the past few years.. from their revenue growth through the recession (thanks to the subscription model), to their entry into the fortune 500 [redhat.com].
But does anyone here think Bill Gates or Microsoft stays awake worried about RH? They pulled in 72x more revenue, 159x more profits, and have 63x more cash on hand (50.69b vs 808m) than Red Hat. Microsoft even has a better profit margin than RH (32.5% vs 13.3%).
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft [yahoo.com]
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=RHT+Key+Statistics [yahoo.com]
Re:Umm (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite....
Technically, Red Hat's "product" is a compiled copy the Linux kernel and associated Open Source Packages required to create a working operating system. Yes the source is free, and Red Hat does follow through on the GPL obligations, but on it's own the source is useless, you can't actually use it without you or someone else spending the time and effort to compile it first. Thus Red Hat is "selling" a compiled and packaged form of the associated source code, however it's sold in the form of a subscription which includes access to software updates and some level of support.
Re:Red Hat also announced some donations (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't the point of Red Hat the support they provide? If you're not buying the support, why run Red Hat at all? Debian can do anything Red Hat can, and it's completely free.
There are cases when you need to run a RHEL-compatible system, but don't want/need the expensive support contract from Red Hat (like when you have to have support for expensive, enterprise-level software where the vendor only supplies drivers in the form of a RHEL-compatible RPM). This is why projects such as CentOS exist.
Desktop market share ~1.5% (Score:4, Informative)
Is the Linux Desktop actually growing? [zdnet.com] quotes a market share figure from Net Applications of 1.4%, up from 0.97% the previous July. Other estimates have put the figure at 1.67%. [linuxfordevices.com] Some analysts are predicting the figure could hit 2% to 3% before the end of 2012.
The author states that 12% of visitors to his tech related web sites run Linux. If that is any indication, then the figure of technologically minded people using Linux desktops already exceeds 10%.
Keep in mind that Apple's global desktop market share is in single figures: Linux desktop market share doesn't have to exceed that of Windows to be considered important.
Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! (Score:5, Informative)
Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company.
They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL.
Um, yes it does.
The source code for all their stuff is available for free here: http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/ [redhat.com].
They don't have to do that. They are only obligated to provide the source on request for a reasonable copying fee to people to whom they distribute binaries to. Instead, they make it freely available to anyone who wants it, without charging a cent for the bandwidth.
Speaking of cents, you can get CentOS [centos.org], which is identical to RHEL minus the branding entirely for free because RedHat make the sources available freely. Also, redhat make the sources avaialble for non GPL software which they simply don't have to do.
So, the claim that they are as proprietary as possible is simply false.