5 ms·

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 com

by 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.
  - krzyk 10y ago
    What do you mean that Linux releases lag behind by a few months? Which products? Firefox and Thunderbird are updating constantly and I don't see a difference between Linux and Windows there.
    - SEJeff 10y ago
      Yeah how long have you used Firefox on Linux? Have you used it since Phoenix / Firebird (before it was called Firefox maybe 2003-2004 I forget the exact dates)? I did, and I distinctly remember when they pretty much shit on all Linux users after it really took off on Windows. Nowadays their releases are always in sync, but that is a more recent thing. I also seem to recall Linux support was much better with Firefox 4 and after, but that was a long time ago and it is a bit fuzzy for me currently.
      - krzyk 10y ago
        I've been using Firefox since Phoenix/Firebird days (crappie 0.x releases), I didn't notice a problem with timing of Linux versions.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I get your points on what issues they have. Yet, you were talking about how Red Hat is so huge in terms of labor and money. I was only bringing up Mozilla in the sense that they're a FOSS company making a ton of money with a bunch of employees that goes far in Red Hat's direction. I've got plenty of ideas for how I'd do it way better as a business. We're talking whether they make big money, though.
    - SEJeff 10y ago
      Ah sorry you're spot on then. Their financials show assets / revenue in the hundreds of millions, so your original statement stands entirely: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Audited_Financial_Statement.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Audit... Hundreds of millions definitely counts as big money to a pee on techie like myself!
jwildeboer 10y ago
Actually we are a $2.xB revenue company ;-)
- SEJeff 10y ago
  At numbers that big, what are a few more hundred million? Chump change!
flamedoge 10y ago
What about Canonical?
- rrdharan 10y ago
  As far as I know, Canonical has never turned a profit.
- danilocesar 10y ago
  Unlike most of Linux fans imagine, Canonical and Red Hat don't compete that much in the corporate world.
  - shanemhansen 10y ago
    I work for a fortune 50, Canonical does a decent job competing there.
    - bonzini 10y ago
      Free or paid?
      - shanemhansen 10y ago
        I don't know if Mark was paid last time I saw him drop by the office, but I imagine he planned on making some money.
        mynameisvlad 10y ago
        Was that snark really necessary? Parent had a valid question; your org could be using the OSS Ubuntu which would be free, or the enterprise version which costs money. You never really specified which, and it changes the argument drastically from a cost perspective (and therefore potentially some of the motivations behind the choice.)
        yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
thinkmassive 10y ago
Cloudera will soon be a publicly held mostly-open source company valued well over a billion dollars. Hortonworks is already public and almost fully-open source, although their market cap is under a billion ($670MM today). Edit: I missed that the billion refers to revenue, and that RedHat is >2 billion. That's extremely impressive! These data platform companies are doing well, but I think they're still doing far under a billion in annual revenue.

by SEJeff 10y ago

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.
- krzyk 10y ago
  What do you mean that Linux releases lag behind by a few months? Which products? Firefox and Thunderbird are updating constantly and I don't see a difference between Linux and Windows there.
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    Yeah how long have you used Firefox on Linux? Have you used it since Phoenix / Firebird (before it was called Firefox maybe 2003-2004 I forget the exact dates)? I did, and I distinctly remember when they pretty much shit on all Linux users after it really took off on Windows. Nowadays their releases are always in sync, but that is a more recent thing. I also seem to recall Linux support was much better with Firefox 4 and after, but that was a long time ago and it is a bit fuzzy for me currently.
    - krzyk 10y ago
      I've been using Firefox since Phoenix/Firebird days (crappie 0.x releases), I didn't notice a problem with timing of Linux versions.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I get your points on what issues they have. Yet, you were talking about how Red Hat is so huge in terms of labor and money. I was only bringing up Mozilla in the sense that they're a FOSS company making a ton of money with a bunch of employees that goes far in Red Hat's direction. I've got plenty of ideas for how I'd do it way better as a business. We're talking whether they make big money, though.
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    Ah sorry you're spot on then. Their financials show assets / revenue in the hundreds of millions, so your original statement stands entirely: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Audited_Financial_Statement.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Audit... Hundreds of millions definitely counts as big money to a pee on techie like myself!

jwildeboer 10y ago

Actually we are a $2.xB revenue company ;-)

SEJeff 10y ago
At numbers that big, what are a few more hundred million? Chump change!

flamedoge 10y ago

What about Canonical?

rrdharan 10y ago
As far as I know, Canonical has never turned a profit.
danilocesar 10y ago
Unlike most of Linux fans imagine, Canonical and Red Hat don't compete that much in the corporate world.
- shanemhansen 10y ago
  I work for a fortune 50, Canonical does a decent job competing there.
  - bonzini 10y ago
    Free or paid?
    - shanemhansen 10y ago
      I don't know if Mark was paid last time I saw him drop by the office, but I imagine he planned on making some money.
      - mynameisvlad 10y ago
        Was that snark really necessary? Parent had a valid question; your org could be using the OSS Ubuntu which would be free, or the enterprise version which costs money. You never really specified which, and it changes the argument drastically from a cost perspective (and therefore potentially some of the motivations behind the choice.)
        yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago

thinkmassive 10y ago

Cloudera will soon be a publicly held mostly-open source company valued well over a billion dollars. Hortonworks is already public and almost fully-open source, although their market cap is under a billion ($670MM today). Edit: I missed that the billion refers to revenue, and that RedHat is >2 billion. That's extremely impressive! These data platform companies are doing well, but I think they're still doing far under a billion in annual revenue.