8 ms·
Red Hat becomes the first open source company to amass a billion dollars
- dhawalhs 15y agoSite seems to be down. Link to Google web cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AweoOZbvjKkJ:blog.zenoss.com/2012/03/why-billion-dollar-red-hat-and-openstack-need-to-dance/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AweoOZb...
- tbalinas 15y agoThanks for that link. Did not know the blog went down last night until this morning. Had not planned on an enormous traffic spike like that :)
- fudged 15y ago1) "Error establishing a database connection" 2) Ars had a great article about this one month ago http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/how-red-hat-killed-its-core-productand-became-a-billion-dollar-business.ars http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/how-red-hat-kil...
- bickfordb 15y agoYou know what's cool?
- callumjones 15y agoNot bringing out that quote and instead contributing something informative to the discussion, that's what would be cool.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- joe_the_user 15y agoThat seems to make them 1/69th the size of Microsoft by revenue but 1/270 the size by profits. Notice that Red Hat's profits are about 1/10 of income but MS' profits are about 1/2 of income. Shows the incentive to get monopoly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedHat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedHat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
- carguy1983 15y agoI think what you mean is revenues. Profit and earnings and income are similar (but slightly different, depending on who you ask), but all 3 are on the other side of the fence from revenues.
- reitzensteinm 15y agoWell, it shows the incentive to run a product company. Even with a monopoly on consulting you're not going to have great profit margins. That said, it really pisses me off that you were down voted like you were. There seems to be a rash of that on HN now. You were contributing to the conversation and backing up your argument with numbers. Right or wrong, that doesn't deserve a drive by dismissal. The voting buttons mean "More or less of this content on HN", not "I agree or disagree". If you disagree, post a reply. You might teach the OP something, or might even learn that you're wrong, as I have plenty of times on HN. Edit: I've turned this into an Ask HN thread here, since I think it would be helpful to have a discussion about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275
- fruchtose 15y agoI'm glad Red Hat is enjoying this kind of success. We need open source code everywhere possible, and we all benefit from businesses running on secure, open source servers. At the same time, Red Hat has remained respectable, even when other open source companies manage to alienate the open source community with otherwise great software (coughOraclecough).
- ww520 15y agoGlad Red Hat is doing well. CentOS is great for production servers.
- giis 15y agocongrats for them,for proving you _can_ make successful business out of open source and continue contributing to oss :).
- rplnt 15y agoThey kind of proved this from the day one. Interesting documentary on this topic is Revolution OS[1]. It is kind of biased and now very outdated but it is still worth watching. If you haven't seen it and you are interested in early history of OSS I recommend it. 1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308808/
- giis 15y agocool,thanks.I'm not aware this documentary.Will watch it soon :)
- wmf 15y agoRed Hat proved that one company can make money using the support business model, but it doesn't look very replicable.
- mrothe 15y agoFirst thing I thought when clicking the link: "No, that's the wrong hat!"
- rjurney 15y agoOpen source sucks as a business. This took way too long. We like to think it works but... it kind of doesn't. Not knocking open source. Just saying the Kumbaya business plan didn't really work out.
- corford 15y agoI suppose it depends how you define a successful bushiness plan. In my book, if a company can create a business that employs a few thousand people, turns a healthy profit and does all that while remaining true to the ideals of open source, it's a pretty successful business plan.
- rjurney 15y agoI agree with you, I just mean... as big as Redhat is, it is a shockingly small company.
- wisty 15y agoOther things which suck as a business - hiring staff, renting an office, paying taxes, advertising, getting legal advice ... The argument is, contributing to open source helps solve your problem in a more sustainable way. Maintaining your own fork of Linux isn't feasible, so you contribute patches back to the mainline. But doing this can be ... daunting, so you might be better paying some third party to handle this for you. Thus Red Hat. Now, your competitors get a free ride on your patch, but presumably they didn't have your problem or have sunk money into an alternative solution, so it's not like they get the same benefit you did.
- zanny 15y agoIt is not a get rich quick scheme, but Red Hat has amazing cred with the enterprise space and as a result user appreciation M$ can't even come close to touching. I'd rather have a slow growing (yet growing) open company than a fast burn private enterprise that shrivels up because of the offensive for profit schemata.