Red Hat: 'Yes, we'll break $1 billion this year'

Red Hat's top brass talks a good game about being concerned with the global macroeconomic situation, but the truth of the matter is that what Red Hat has is selling despite the economy, or maybe because of it. And all that the world's largest beneficiary of the open source community needs to do is not screw it up and it will …

[peter 45]

funny how

You can't make money from open source.

[El Cid Campeador]

Agreed

Just goes to show--they must be offering good support or people wouldn't be renewing. Open Source can and is generating profits.

[ehoffman]

Good decision after all...

RedHat make money from support, and installing RedHat require to provide a license key.

Sure, the source is available, this is how CentOS and Oracle's Unbreakable Linux (that's the name of their distribution) is based on RedHat source.

However, the decision of RedHat to obfuscate the source code this year seem to have paid off. There's no more CentOS or Oracle Linux based on the new RedHat. The source is still available (since it's GPL), but have all patches pre-applied, making it somewhat very hard to reverse-engineer the changes (must be hard, since there's still no CentOS 6 after half a year).

With no other 'clone' distros around, RedHat is flying solo, taking the money from all the companies that are used to using free clone distributions as CentOS.

[Richard 33]

Re: ehoffman

Red Hat do not "obfuscate the source code". CentOS 6 is delayed entirely down to problems with CentOS and the CentOS team. Scientific Linux managed a release of 6.0 ages ago.

[Emo]

Check yourself, before you wreck yourself.

CentOS 6.0 is due out 27/06/11.

http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa/calendar

Check it out.