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Case in point, Red Hat built a $32B business off of mostly selling support contracts for FOSS. Notionally some amount of that was licensing deals, but the core
by dodobirdlord 6y ago
Case in point, Red Hat built a $32B business off of mostly selling support contracts for FOSS. Notionally some amount of that was licensing deals, but the core reason to buy RHEL instead of using Debian or something was because RHEL comes with support.
- freedomben 6y agoYou aren't wrong, but I do think it's worth pointing out that Red Hat writes a metric ton of FOSS code also which it contributes upstream (or the upstream is entirely RH owned/controlled). For example, Red Hat is the number two contributor to Kubernetes (behind Google). Red Hat extends K8s with OpenShift which makes K8s a PaaS, and that is also open source and freely available as OKD[1]. RH doesn't get paid directly for that work but funds it with support contracts (which in turn enable landing more support contracts). I know that doesn't contradict what you said, I just don't want to leave a reader with the impression that RH just tacks on a support contract and makes some money. RH does a huge amount of dev on it too. [1]: https://www.okd.io/ https://www.okd.io/