Red Hat Nearing $1 billion in revenue | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat Nearing $1 billion in revenue

zdnet.com

76 pointsmarcog118 comments

It took me a long time to settle in on one Linux distribution, but Red Hat is it for me. I really feel as though I can trust the company to innovate and deliver products that are aligned with my long-term objectives.

Thank you, Red Hat.

innovate and deliver products that are aligned with my long-term objectives

I'm tempted to simply make a joke about whether Red Hat also leverages your synergies and upscales your key metrics -- but I'll ask the question: what does that mean?

Can you give me an example of what you're talking about? (Vis-a-vis another distro?)

Yeah, this (-> http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html) popped into my head when I read that too.

Red Hat has made some cool stuff though. Not sure if it would be my first choice if I had to choose a distro to deploy, however.

How about EGit and JBoss?

Going after another distro might be a bad idea though. It's late here.

Do you actually use Red Hat, or do you use CentOS or another community compilation of Red Hat source?

good to see RH being profitable. They put a lot back into the open-source technologies that are the foundation of their business, much more than many other modern tech companies, ahem facebook, amazon whose contributions are relatively small compared to their huge profits

The question is, does Redhat have a repeatable business model, or is it a combination of being in the right place at the right time, with very good execution?

redhat has been in business for almost 20 years. They're traded publicly. They have over 3,000 employees.

I'm pretty sure they have a repeatable business model.

I think the question is more: is there room for more than one RedHat?

They're by far the biggest and most notable "Linux company", and all the other companies like them have had a way of either getting bought to become a mere division of a corporate giant (like SuSE to Novell), or else losing money until they become irrelevant. It's important to have at least one or two corporate sponsors of Linux that won't "sell out" or screw the community in favor of their proprietary offerings.

If Canonical can get to where they are comfortably profitable and growing for two or three years, then I think we can say that RedHat's repeatable, but until then we'll only have the one example of a sustainable and successful independent Linux company.

it's not an easy thing to repeat. people buy from redhat because redhat has a long history of being very reliable, and they also employ some of the best linux hackers in the world. your startup can't compete with redhat's 20 year rock solid history. your startup can't hire away famous kernel hackers. redhat is also very good at what they do, so most of their customers are happy and not actively looking for an alternative.

Definitely, credit to the way redhat has executed. Kudos to the team.

But I guess the "Can't do", "Can't compete" has been said many times over in several cases and proven wrong. Its only a question of time before a determined team proves it all wrong. :)

What are you trying to say with this question?

Are most major companies something that have a repeatable business model or are they a combination of being in the right place at the right time, with very good execution?

Would you want for your own company a repeatable business model or to be in the right place at the right time, with very good execution?

Could you even make a repeatable business model without a combination of being in the right place at the right time, with very good execution?

Really, I don't understand your question at all.

Fair enough, I'll clarify: When I say repeatable business model, I mean something like selling physical products online(amazon, zappos), selling physical hardware (IBM, HP), , selling enterprise software (oracle, SAP), or selling SAAS subscriptions (SalesForce, ec2).

Is giving away a 'community edition' of software and selling an enterprise licensed one repeatable to other types of software, or is it a unique case where Linux became The other server operating system, and they were both lucky and skilled enough to become the number one provider of linux.

Is giving away a 'community edition' of software and selling an enterprise licensed one repeatable to other types of software, or is it a unique case where Linux became The other server operating system, and they were both lucky and skilled enough to become the number one provider of linux.

There are a lot of other companies doing this, or something very much like it. Some of them have been around for a while, but I don't know any details of how profitable they are (or aren't).

I do know I'm taking a stab at doing this model myself, so I'll let ya know how it works out in a couple of years. :-)

MySQL?

Personally I think its all about execution, and yes if someone can execute well. Canonical comes to mind. There is a significant barrier to entry in terms of the 'scale' of the product though. MySql made sense, sendmail less so.

While I like some of the things Ubuntu did for Linux, I don't think that'a good example as a business. As far as I know, they still don't make money.

I don't know any significant business linked to linux on the desktop, actually, they all failed financially.

Does RedHat have a product similar to Microsoft's Visio?

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