CEO: Red Hat potentially first billion dollar OSS company in 2012

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Red-Hat-Reports-Second-bw-474607315.html

by sthlm • 15 years ago

46 13 15 years ago

finance.yahoo.com

nkassis• 15 years ago

Go job to them. I know they get a lot of ill will in the Linux community but I've never understood it. They are the only distribution vendor who's managed to make a decent profit from their work. They also contribute a lot to the development of the kernel, gnome and many other projects.

I can't say I'm a big fan of using RHEL personally but at work I've usually stuck with them on big servers just cause it's less driver/support hassel and it's easier to find people who can administer them.

SwellJoe2• 15 years ago

I've never understood the Red Hat hate, either. They were the first commercial distro that was fully Open Source, and they've contributed more to the kernel, and Gnome, and a number of other projects than any other organization, and continues to be the single biggest contributor to a large number of projects.

I generally can't afford RHEL, though I've deployed it in the past for clients who wanted a commercially supported distro, but I get most of the benefits of RHEL by running Scientific Linux or CentOS on my servers. And I run Fedora on my laptop, which is still my favorite desktop distro, by far (I keep trying Ubuntu, every couple of revisions, and finding way too many things to hate about it).

Anyway, I think Red Hat's success is a great thing, particularly for companies trying to make a living in the Open Source world (which mine happens to be).

ableal• 15 years ago

"Die, heretic scum", by Emo Phillips ;-)

(e.g. http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/EmoPhillips.htm)

jstedfast• 15 years ago

Who's giving them any ill will? Where is this Red Hat hate?

I used to work for Novell/SUSE and even we didn't hate Red Hat. So I can't imagine who, in the Linux community, is hating Red Hat.

hackermom• 15 years ago

I suspect that the Mozilla Foundation, the runner-up with their current $100+ million annual revenue, will be the second company in this achievement.

fatherlinux• 15 years ago

Sourcefire is the second larges at about 120M last I checked. I don't remember Mozilla being that big. I know Ubuntu is significantly smaller.

rwmj2• 15 years ago

We're open sourcing our virtualization management product too on the 1st November:

http://www.ovirt.org/

sciurus• 15 years ago

So oVirt is the same software as RHEV-M 3.0?

rwmj2• 15 years ago

It's the Java / Linux version of it, yes.

Confusingly "oVirt" has in the past referred to some different software. That's what you get for recycling a convenient domain name that we happened to own ...

aliguori• 15 years ago

Right, it's derived from the Qumranet SolidICE product. That's one big credit to Red Hat, they've had a consistent record of acquiring closed source companies and turning the products into successful Open Source projects.

sek• 15 years ago

With all this inflation, not so impressive.

CEO: Red Hat potentially first billion dollar OSS company in 2012

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