CEO: Red Hat potentially first billion dollar OSS company in 2012 | Hacker News Reader

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

finance.yahoo.com

46 pointssthlm13 comments

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.

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).

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

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

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.

I hear it all the time, mostly from Ubuntu and Debian users (we have millions of users, so I get an earful of just about every strongly held opinion out there), but occasionally from SUSE and FreeBSD users.

It tends to be sour grapes about Red Hat and derivatives being the most popular. That may change now that Ubuntu is approaching similar popularity on servers (which is the sort of Linux users I interact with). But, I also hear quite a bit of bellyaching about RPM and yum, which I can't fathom...I prefer them to apt-get/dpkg, though both are perfectly acceptable and I rarely complain about either.

But, I hear a lot of complaints about just about everything. So, maybe Red Hat just gets the biggest share because they get the biggest share of the money in the Linux distro market.

No, we didn't, but I got some funny looks when I said one time, in Nuremberg, that Red Hat 7.3 was the Best Distro Ever. :)

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

http://www.ovirt.org/

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

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.

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 ...

With all this inflation, not so impressive.

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

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.

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