10 ms·

> they're the most successful free software business in history. Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Asking seriously, si

• oddevan 10y ago
  Automattic comes to mind: AFAIK they've built a pretty successful business on WordPress and related products.
  • 0xCMP 10y ago
    They aren't public, but yes I believe they are valued at 1bn+ too
    • bronson 10y ago
      There's a big difference between valuation and revenue.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  • grkvlt 10y ago
    Who? They're not even in the same ballpark. RH has 10k employees and USD 1bn in revenue with a market cap of ~15bn, these guys just seem to be a ~500 person WordPress shop.
    • mintplant 10y ago
      Automattic is the WordPress shop. They develop WordPress and run WordPress.com. There aren't any recent revenue numbers available, but indirectly powering ~25% of the internet is nothing to sneeze at.
      • fnj 10y ago
        How much of the internet's destructive hacking do they "power"?
        • mintplant 10y ago
          Quite a bit, I imagine, but unfortunately security does not necessarily correlate to popularity.
          • collinmanderson 10y ago
            They now do automatic security updates, so the situation should improve.
      • grkvlt 10y ago
        That's interesting; they really don't have the brand recognition they deserve then. I would consider myself as reasonably well-informed as the next HN reader, and I certainly hadn't heard of them. Of course I don't work with WordPress - but i have heard of WordPress...
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
• roymurdock 10y ago
  Canonical (Ubuntu), and SUSE as well.
  • dragonquest 10y ago
    Surely, not SuSe. Novell didn't really handle that well.
  • nerdponx 10y ago
    RStudio seems successful so far as well.
  • nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I thought Canonical was losing money.
    • AsyncAwait 10y ago
      I am pretty sure they've been in the black, but not by much, for some time.
      • nickpsecurity 10y ago
        It was losing tens of millions just a few years ago to try to get into mobile. The financials are also private. Doesn't leave me much to go on. :)
        • AsyncAwait 10y ago
          Ah yes, that may be it, I am fairly sure they were in the black for a while from their cloud services, but they probably blew that on their push to mobile.
          • nickpsecurity 10y ago
            The same article said they were approaching break-even before the mobile push. So maybe, maybe not. It's clear they could do it if they wanted to. It seems to have mostly lost money that Shuttleworth put into it out of his pocket, though. That's too bad because I like what they've done in terms of usability of Linux outside Unity. I switched to Mint at that point until the distro got subverted way too easily. Then back to Ubuntu with shitty Unity. I can't wait for the new one without it that was just announced since the mobile thing didn't pan out.
• yeukhon 10y ago
  > Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Are you sure you meant "open source software" not free software?
  • Panini_Jones 10y ago
    The software is free, is it not? Red Hat's business model is subscription based.
    • kbenson 10y ago
      The software is free. CentOS is a testament to that.
    • yeukhon 10y ago
      No, I am referring to Stallman's view on free software. See below. Software free to download vs "free software" from a license PoV aren't necessarily the same. Redhat's products are best to describe as open source software. https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html
      • duozerk 10y ago
        Redhat's code is Free software, actually. The page you link simply says they don't follow the free software distribution guidelines (and thus are not endorsed by the FSF/GNU project) because they also allow non-free software in their repos.
      • schoen 10y ago
        A better reference for Stallman's view here is probably https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html, which shows why Red Hat's business is probably reasonably described as a free software business (particularly since "the differences in extension of the category [open source] are small").
      • cyphar 10y ago
        You're incorrect. Red Hat (and SUSE)'s distributions are free-as-in-freedom software (or at the very least, the majority of the distribution is free -- the link you posted is complaining about a very small minority of the software that is part of such distributions [which is a problem but is not as big of a problem as you claim]). The fact that you won't get official updates after a trial period (or if your subscription runs out) isn't against the principles of free software. As a user, you still have the source code and have the freedom to maintain the distribution yourself (nobody does, but the freedom is still there).
• callahad 10y ago
  Firefox, WordPress, Drupal, and Wikipedia may also fit your definition.
  • Paul-ish 10y ago
    GitLab as well, although they are younger.
    • educar 10y ago
      Gitlab is not open source.
      • sytse 10y ago
        Correct, we're an open core organization. GitLab CE is open source.
        • Paul-ish 10y ago
          Ah okay, I guess I didn't understand the distinction.
  • jldugger 10y ago
    Drupal and Wikipedia aren't even for-profit companies.
• tekklloneer 10y ago
  There's a ton of them. Many of them are smaller players consisting of core developers providing feature additions for money, or support contracts, or selling an "enterprise" wrapper/hosted. scala, mail servers come to mind quickly
  • davidw 10y ago
    It's really difficult from a business point of view. To have a business, you have to have something scarce to sell people - it could be simply your time, but that's difficult to scale. For most companies it's some kind of product, but open source products are inherently not scarce. So to succeed, you have to have a source of scarcity in there somewhere, and that's not always easy, on top of the fact that no startup is ever easy.
    • iamacynic 10y ago
      it's bad only if that's the company you want to take to $1 billion scale. what if you don't have hot shot VC buddies from princeton, and didn't go to stanford, and need to make $1m in cash to do your real business idea? all of a sudden doing paid features for an open source project or doing consulting sounds like a fantastic idea because that will get you to $1m, almost guaranteed (if you're generally capable) hint: that's pretty much everyone.
      • davidw 10y ago
        Consulting is not a great business in a lot of ways, and 1 million is not at all easy unless you're 1) someplace where that's not a lot of money, or 2) you're famous. I would heartily suggest avoiding it, as it's also not scalable even at a small size. Look at the kind of stuff the 'micropreneur' guys do, like patio11's bingo thing. That was small (I agree with you there) but still something that once running, kept making money without a daily grind like consulting.
        • iamacynic 10y ago
          you do it until you get the money, then do what you want. maybe you're not getting what i'm saying because it involves investing (aka betting) your own money into something.
• jimktrains2 10y ago
  I guess it depends what you mean. Places like CartoDB have all their stuff as F/OSS but still make money on support and hosting.
• chirau 10y ago
  Isn't Apache technically free as well?
  • SEJeff 10y ago
    Apache is a foundation however, not really a "business" per-se.
    • davidw 10y ago
      The Apache Software Foundation is in no way shape or form a business. It's a non-profit with maybe 1 or 2 full-time people (last I recall) and tons of people who commit to projecs.
      • SEJeff 10y ago
        You're literally reiterating what I said.
        • davidw 10y ago
          I didn't think "not really a business per se" was emphatic enough.
        • thomastjeffery 10y ago
          Must every comment be an argument?
• SEJeff 10y ago
  There is no billion dollar open source company outside of Redhat, if a billion dollars in revenue is your benchmark. On pure success financially from an OSS company, they truly are unrivaled. Otherwise, there are thousands of small open source companies that do quite well for themselves. If you look at pure profit however, Redhat does abysmally compared to say Microsoft or Apple, or any traditional proprietary software company. Due to this, the valuation for a purely open source company have to be lower which prevents a lot of the VC funding frenzy for "the next unicorn company". If you want small and sustainable OSS can work. Otherwise, Redhat is the black swan in that they pulled off something thought to be impossible.
  • nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Mozilla should be considered in similar category to Red Hat. They make almost half as much in the hundreds of millions range. That's focusing on search revenue instead of doing lots of products like Red Hat does. If they did that for enterprise, they'd probably be in the billion a year situation Red Hat is. Especially now that the competitors are surveillance engines & they could differentiate w/ paid offering. Even per organization rather than per user. Plus value-added services like encrypted backups. They have a lot of potential that's underutilized.
    • SEJeff 10y ago
      Maybe, but from a corporate standpoint, Mozilla's leadership is pretty abysmal. Take the entire debacle with Mozilla Messaging. It was pretty much the only serious game in town for a decent gui mail client on Linux or really cross platform and they dropped it on the floor instead of finding some way to monetize it. I'd have paid for a decent Linux mail client with sensible calendaring (that isn't evolution aka outlook for Linux). I lost a lot of faith in Mozilla years ago when the Firefox brand was starting to get really big and the Linux releases for everything Mozilla would lag behind by a few months. As a very early and avid Mozilla Phoenix/Firebird user, I lost faith in the brand as a whole. Sure they're doing wonderful things with webgl and the bleeding edge javascript stuff, but so is Google, and arguably to a greater degree. Their potential is underutilized due to pathetic leadership, which will continue to flounder until that is resolved.
• alsadi 10y ago
  There many success stories in opensource companies but they are not as open as redhat nor as succesdful as redhat. There is a consulting company over the corner that customizes opensource software at small scale. There coreos, percona, suse,... Oracle is the only multi billion dollar database-centric company. Faceboom is the only successful social media (twitter is micro blogging or whatever you call it) Microsoft is the only desktop blah blah Amazon blah blah That is a result of being early, acquire many small successful companies ex. Kvm, ceph, Ansible,... And being really truely opensource. No one else is truely opensource, ex. Mysql used to sell exceptions and prosperity features instead of selling Enterprise support.
  • Arizhel 10y ago
    >Faceboom is the only successful social media Was that a Freudian slip or something? :-) I'm going to have to remember that one.
• cyphar 10y ago
  SUSE is older than RedHat and is also successful.