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Comment by pdeva1 | Hacker News Reader

Wonder what caused such a high valuation. They definitely didnt seem to have enough revenues to justify it.

I would imagine it is not so much about Ansible's general valuation in the industry but about its value for Red Hat (a.k.a -- Red Hat is not buying Ansible for its revenues but for its technology).

What are you buying when the technology is open source?

The dev team?

The team and the existing user base

The direction in which the technology evolves. That's also the reason why Red Hat hires a lot of upstream developers[1]. It is easier to tailor your services and offer better support (ie: the revenue stream for Red Hat) for OSS when the developers who write it are on your payroll.

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions
  http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/red-hat-leads-open-source-contributions-to-kernel

Not all of Ansible's technology is open source.

My guess is ansible tower, along with the dev team and existing customer base for paid services.

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