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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

There is no billion dollar open source company outside of Redhat, if a billion dollars in revenue is your benchmark. On pure success financially from an OSS company, they truly are unrivaled.

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.

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Mozilla should be considered in similar category to Red Hat. They make almost half as much in the hundreds of millions range. That's focusing on search revenue instead of doing lots of products like Red Hat does. If they did that for enterprise, they'd probably be in the billion a year situation Red Hat is. Especially now that the competitors are surveillance engines & they could differentiate w/ paid offering. Even per organization rather than per user. Plus value-added services like encrypted backups.

They have a lot of potential that's underutilized.

Maybe, but from a corporate standpoint, Mozilla's leadership is pretty abysmal. Take the entire debacle with Mozilla Messaging. It was pretty much the only serious game in town for a decent gui mail client on Linux or really cross platform and they dropped it on the floor instead of finding some way to monetize it. I'd have paid for a decent Linux mail client with sensible calendaring (that isn't evolution aka outlook for Linux).

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.

What do you mean that Linux releases lag behind by a few months?

Which products? Firefox and Thunderbird are updating constantly and I don't see a difference between Linux and Windows there.

Yeah how long have you used Firefox on Linux? Have you used it since Phoenix / Firebird (before it was called Firefox maybe 2003-2004 I forget the exact dates)? I did, and I distinctly remember when they pretty much shit on all Linux users after it really took off on Windows.

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.

I've been using Firefox since Phoenix/Firebird days (crappie 0.x releases), I didn't notice a problem with timing of Linux versions.

I get your points on what issues they have. Yet, you were talking about how Red Hat is so huge in terms of labor and money. I was only bringing up Mozilla in the sense that they're a FOSS company making a ton of money with a bunch of employees that goes far in Red Hat's direction. I've got plenty of ideas for how I'd do it way better as a business. We're talking whether they make big money, though.

Ah sorry you're spot on then. Their financials show assets / revenue in the hundreds of millions, so your original statement stands entirely:

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!

Same here! I was looking for it one day wondering how much money an open-source browser was "scrapping by" with... to find... "Holy shit! Hundreds of millions of dollars!?" I can only dream...

Mozilla is (in practice) a non-profit, monetization is not the goal outside of what is necessary for continuity.

Is that really true? It seems most of their effort is funded by the corporation that makes boatloads of money off search revenue. Then, there's the nonprofit that owns it. I believe monetization is definitely one of their goals even though I can't say the priority.

> 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.

That's the job of the linux distro, not mozilla.

Actually we are a $2.xB revenue company ;-)

At numbers that big, what are a few more hundred million? Chump change!

Cloudera will soon be a publicly held mostly-open source company valued well over a billion dollars.

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.

What about Canonical?

As far as I know, Canonical has never turned a profit.

Unlike most of Linux fans imagine, Canonical and Red Hat don't compete that much in the corporate world.

I work for a fortune 50, Canonical does a decent job competing there.

Free or paid?

I don't know if Mark was paid last time I saw him drop by the office, but I imagine he planned on making some money.

Was that snark really necessary? Parent had a valid question; your org could be using the OSS Ubuntu which would be free, or the enterprise version which costs money. You never really specified which, and it changes the argument drastically from a cost perspective (and therefore potentially some of the motivations behind the choice.)

But in all fairness: CentOS

Besides that, from the open source perspective, RedHat's contribution is greater than Canonical， especially the linux kernel.

Not just the Linux kernel. Canonical is primarily a consumer of open source that does some really need value add ontop of it (see Juju for an outstanding example). Redhat is primarily an excellent engineering company with good enterprise sales and (compared to Canonical) lousy marketing.

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