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Red Hat sells their product, despite it being open source. When you buy Red Hat, you buy support for your product, as well as a guarantee that it works with a c

Red Hat sells their product, despite it being open source. When you buy Red Hat, you buy support for your product, as well as a guarantee that it works with a certain set of hardware and has been well tested on that hardware. Red Hat releases everything as open source, and they don't even make it hard to reassemble if you want to (see CentOS, which does just that). They could provide the sources in quite a difficult manner, but they don't. And they still pull in quite a bit of business.

moron4hire 16y ago
To the contrary, Red Hat is the perfect example for why Open Source does NOT pay. Sure, Red Hat is making money off of OSS, but the thousands of people who built all of those pieces of software are not. Red Hat can make a living off of support contracts because they didn't have to pay for the majority of the development work.