Time has shown that Red Hat really knows what they're doing, on many different levels, and they're the most successful free software business in history.
Now that's a great ad agency.
And yet the word free does not appear anywhere in TFA.
Now I can't find any mention of free software on their site's About pages.
Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history?
Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.
They're not even in the same ballpark. RH has 10k employees and USD 1bn in revenue with a market cap of ~15bn, these guys just seem to be a ~500 person WordPress shop.
That's too bad because I like what they've done in terms of usability of Linux outside Unity. I switched to Mint at that point until the distro got subverted way too easily. Then back to Ubuntu with shitty Unity. I can't wait for the new one without it that was just announced since the mobile thing didn't pan out.
Are you sure you meant "open source software" not free software?
The fact that you won't get official updates after a trial period (or if your subscription runs out) isn't against the principles of free software. As a user, you still have the source code and have the freedom to maintain the distribution yourself (nobody does, but the freedom is still there).
The difference is that Atlassian sells plenty of proprietary software and add ons too, while the only proprietary software that Red Hat sells comes from recent acquisitions (e.g., Ansible Tower), and it is all in the process of becoming open source.
Red Hat has a great track record for open sourcing software from companies that they acquired.
Then it is not open source. Open source has a strict definition, from the OSI.
(I'm not sure if it's still a Service Mark or not, though it was at one time.)
It is a bit tricky here. Based on the situation, the same software can be some times be open source AND free software, or open source only (ie, not free software).
Eg: Linux kernel. When it is run on your computer, usually it is open source and mostly free-software (linux-libre would be fully free). When it is run on your router, they (vendor) shall give you the source code, but may not allow you to modify it. This is violation of freedom 1 (The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish). Then it won't be a free software, but just open source. You can't even confirm whether the source code they gave corresponds to the binary run in the router.
scala, mail servers come to mind quickly
To have a business, you have to have something scarce to sell people - it could be simply your time, but that's difficult to scale. For most companies it's some kind of product, but open source products are inherently not scarce.
So to succeed, you have to have a source of scarcity in there somewhere, and that's not always easy, on top of the fact that no startup is ever easy.
what if you don't have hot shot VC buddies from princeton, and didn't go to stanford, and need to make $1m in cash to do your real business idea? all of a sudden doing paid features for an open source project or doing consulting sounds like a fantastic idea because that will get you to $1m, almost guaranteed (if you're generally capable)
hint: that's pretty much everyone.
I would heartily suggest avoiding it, as it's also not scalable even at a small size.
Look at the kind of stuff the 'micropreneur' guys do, like patio11's bingo thing. That was small (I agree with you there) but still something that once running, kept making money without a daily grind like consulting.
maybe you're not getting what i'm saying because it involves investing (aka betting) your own money into something.
Creating a product - even a small scale one - is much more of an investment (and a risk), because while you're building it, it earns nothing. The payoff is that it can make money while you're asleep.
Otherwise, there are thousands of small open source companies that do quite well for themselves. If you look at pure profit however, Redhat does abysmally compared to say Microsoft or Apple, or any traditional proprietary software company. Due to this, the valuation for a purely open source company have to be lower which prevents a lot of the VC funding frenzy for "the next unicorn company". If you want small and sustainable OSS can work. Otherwise, Redhat is the black swan in that they pulled off something thought to be impossible.
They have a lot of potential that's underutilized.
I lost a lot of faith in Mozilla years ago when the Firefox brand was starting to get really big and the Linux releases for everything Mozilla would lag behind by a few months. As a very early and avid Mozilla Phoenix/Firebird user, I lost faith in the brand as a whole. Sure they're doing wonderful things with webgl and the bleeding edge javascript stuff, but so is Google, and arguably to a greater degree.
Their potential is underutilized due to pathetic leadership, which will continue to flounder until that is resolved.
Which products? Firefox and Thunderbird are updating constantly and I don't see a difference between Linux and Windows there.
Nowadays their releases are always in sync, but that is a more recent thing. I also seem to recall Linux support was much better with Firefox 4 and after, but that was a long time ago and it is a bit fuzzy for me currently.
https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Audit...
Hundreds of millions definitely counts as big money to a pee on techie like myself!
That's the job of the linux distro, not mozilla.
Hortonworks is already public and almost fully-open source, although their market cap is under a billion ($670MM today).
Edit: I missed that the billion refers to revenue, and that RedHat is >2 billion. That's extremely impressive! These data platform companies are doing well, but I think they're still doing far under a billion in annual revenue.
Oracle is the only multi billion dollar database-centric company. Faceboom is the only successful social media (twitter is micro blogging or whatever you call it) Microsoft is the only desktop blah blah Amazon blah blah
That is a result of being early, acquire many small successful companies ex. Kvm, ceph, Ansible,... And being really truely opensource.
No one else is truely opensource, ex. Mysql used to sell exceptions and prosperity features instead of selling Enterprise support.
Was that a Freudian slip or something? :-)
I'm going to have to remember that one.
I may still have the shards it finally splintered into one day as I was rescuing a system....