

Red Hat Nearing $1 billion in revenue - marcog1
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/red-hat-nearing-1-billion-in-revenue-not-bad-for-free-software/46445

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rch
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.

~~~
pinko
_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?)

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sceadu
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.

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bryanwb
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

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runT1ME
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?

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elbrodeur
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.

~~~
wtallis
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.

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

