
Why There Will Never Be Another RedHat: The Economics of Open Source (2014) - jayliew
https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/
======
bubblethink
I feel that there is an inherent conflict of interest in the OSS support sales
model. Hypothetically, if your software were really simple and robust (think
standard unix utilities), nobody would pay for support. On the other end, if
you have to deploy openstack, kubernetes, or any other stack with a lot of
moving parts, you need support and personnel. So in a perverse way, it's in
your interest to make complicated shit. In reality, it is perhaps not quite as
bad, but I definitely feel that with a lot of projects for which RH is the
sole upstream, the quality or elegance isn't quite there when compared to more
traditional linux or unixy things which have more diverse upstreams. This
manifests in systemd, freeipa, glusterfs etc. too. These are generally hard
problems though. So it's not quite black and white.

~~~
hinkley
One of the ways I poke fun at the Apache foundation is to point out that their
online documentation is vague and uninspiring, and then poof the lead
maintainers write an Oreilly book that explains all the whys and hows and
whats.

~~~
nemo44x
Documentation doesn't exist to explain concepts and give tutorials so much as
document functionality and possibly show examples of use.

~~~
ergothus
Why not? Document functionality and possibly showing examples is great (in
general I'm a big advocate for examples), but those don't preclude explaining
concepts.

Some of the best documentation I've experienced covers concepts, some of the
worst doesn't.

~~~
nemo44x
I think one of the best reasons is because for users that have some experience
with the technology want to be able to quickly find the documentation they're
interested in. Can this API do X, for instance. And if it can what is
required, what is optional and what are the ranges for values.

I don't want to wade through lots of text and other clutter. I'd much rather
have a tutorial or training be a different thing I can use when new to the
technology.

~~~
ergothus
Those are valid points, but that just means the API documentation and the
concept documentation should largely be separate documents, not that the
documentation doesn't belong. In the best cases a link over to relevant
concept docs from API and vice-versa is great, and occasionally enlightens
even hardened devs ("wait, there's an API to do this directly?", "Wait, this
concept was added and streamlined in the 3 years since I first used this
product?", etc)

------
TaylorAlexander
One thing we could do, if we wanted, is to build a society focused on
automating away jobs. Such a society would not rely on people to work for its
function, but on the labor of machines.

In such a place, people would be free to work as hard as they want for
additional gain. They could also, however, take as much time off as they
desired to go to school, learn on their own, spend more time with loved ones,
or just relax and explore life in their own way.

In such a society, I think many people would be motivated to give their labor
to open source projects. I think the machines that run such a society would
necessarily be open source, and many people could give back to society by
contributing to the design and improvement of the machines that provide for us
all.

What do you all think of this? Would you want to live in a place like that?

~~~
macspoofing
That society will not exist. People derive meaning from work. Ambition also
drives personal development. You take those away and all a person has left is
self-medication with drugs and booze and suicide. We need the struggle.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
The comment above said that you work for "additional gain".

The parent comment didn't want to get rid of work. Just focus open source work
improving robots that did the jobs we used to.

All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to.

~~~
macspoofing
>All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to.

Maybe. This discussion is a little abstract, but if OP is proposing a system
where there is an outlet for ambition that lets crazy people push themselves
to raise themselves above others, then I have no qualms against that. The
problem is that such a system is going to look a lot like capitalism or some
sort of market-economy (maybe with a social welfare state). That is, such as a
system is going to to look like either our society, or it will be a disaster
like Venezuela (in the extreme) or Argentina and Brazil.

You point me to a past, or present society that is a model for what OP is
trying to argue for?

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Obviously I don't condone this.. but a good example would be White Slave
owning society in the United States pre 1860.

Most of the "labor" on a plantation was done by slaves which will be very
similar to the automated labor provided by robots of the future.

But those slave owners still had jobs to do, they were still competitive with
each other. They still used money and tried to acquire more wealth.

Sparta was a neat example too. Menial labor was provided by slaves, but
Spartan Citizens competed with each other for military honors and societal
placement.

~~~
macspoofing
>a good example would be White Slave owning society in the United States pre
1860.

Wow. Ok. Setting aside the humanitarian disaster that the South was in the
1800s, here's some qualification to your example:

\- The South was poor, much poorer than the North, both in economic and
technological advancement.

\- The vast majority of Southerners were NOT slave owners. Meaning that
Southern society was extremely stratified with wealth concentrated with a
relatively small number of plantation owners. So your example is more inline
with a bunch of rich people hanging out together.

But your example does touch on the actual deep problem with automation. The
Southerners that prospered under Slavery did so because they owned most of the
capital (land and slaves), but the poor non-plantation-owning population still
had to work to provide for themselves! Under a cynical (but realistic) views
on automation, we expect to see owners of the automatons do great, but what of
the masses? Bolting either UBI or increasing our social welfare state is not a
solution, because redistribution of wealth is not _the_ core problem (we know
how to redistribute wealth - with plenty of examples from modern market
economies with social welfare, to less-market/more-socialist attempts as
exemplified by your traditional Soviet-style economies). The problem is we
don't know how to run a society where the vast majority of people have nothing
to do.

------
olivermarks
This old VC written article reminds me of Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history'
thinking at the end of last century.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)

VC's love the winner take all big platform investment world. I suspect (and
hope) that era is coming to an end, not open source...

~~~
benwerd
And in fact, we're seeing some great open source companies, including Elastic,
which just had an IPO last month. Modern decentralization has yielded the
promise of valuable assets that actually become more valuable _through_ being
open, which means that VCs in 2018 are singing a very different tune to VCs in
2014.

No, we won't see another company that's exactly like Red Hat. That's how the
technology industry works. We're not going to see another successful Facebook,
either. But we will see many more companies that push our expectations and
moves the industry forward. Many of them will absolutely be based on open
source software and communities.

~~~
ummonk
Elastic uses a lot of closed source software to complement its open source
core, which is exactly what the article said is the future of OSS.

------
mperham
If you don't think about how you will sustain an open source project, your
project will not be sustainable. "Those who fail to plan, plan to fail."

Building a business model on top of my open source Sidekiq[0] project was the
best decision I've ever made. That doesn't mean my approach will work for all
(or even many) projects but anyone who is trying to build a popular project
needs to consider: if I succeed, what will the project look like five years
from now? Will you or a core team still be helping users every day?

[0]: [https://sidekiq.org](https://sidekiq.org)

~~~
profalseidol
+1 for using LGPL.

However, seems like there's lots of features that is proprietary (or at least
non-free licensed).

~~~
mperham
Yep, and there's an easy value proposition here:

Almost all of those features are available as OSS plugins. Do you want to
gather 5-10 complex plugins, integrate them all, debug them and support them
for years to come? Or pay for a turn-key solution that takes literally one
minute to buy and get running?

If a business can afford a laptop, it can afford my Enterprise product.

------
bwang29
The problem of open source is attribution, more specifically attribution back
to individual contributors and the significance of contributions, and it is
especially hard if you want to do attribution based on revenue performance if
the licensee is small and do not have an audit department. A large proprietary
software licensee can work with a licensor to track revenue performance
because the licensee already have the right infrastructure to do so. So here
is a startup idea:

An external auditing company with APIs to streamline the process of rev share
and attribution back to the open source community and contributors, so that
open source projects will make revenue and have the resource to reinvest and
improve the projects.

~~~
user5994461
Receiving attributions doesn't pay the bills.

~~~
irrational
I imagine most open source contributors have full time jobs. I have a full-
time job that pays the bills so I don't need any kind of monetary
reimbursement for my work on open-source projects. I just do it for the
fun/challenge/scratch-an-itch/giving-back/etc.

~~~
coldtea
> _I imagine most open source contributors have full time jobs_

Yes: writing open source for companies. Much fewer do it as a hobby, and those
can't sustain large projects.

------
beatgammit
> no other public standalone companies

Well, SUSE isn't public, but they're mostly "standalone". And there are plenty
of other companies based around a single open source platform.

Sure, they aren't $1B+ companies, but they don't need to be.

~~~
idm_guru
I'm recording a podcast, called Open Source Underdogs, focusing on open source
business models. You can find it on iTunes, Google, Stitcher, etc or on the
website [https://opensourceunderdogs.com](https://opensourceunderdogs.com)

IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It
seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective
tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business.

What about Cloudera? What about Automattic? What about MongoDB? What about
MariaDB?

The podcast has 9 episodes, and we have about 20 more in the queue for
2018-2019.

Tune in... Some of the gurus of open source software share some valuable
insights.

~~~
jldugger
> IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It
> seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective
> tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business.

It's more about sustaining the business. Redhat's most recently reported
quarterly earnings growth was negative. Did they sell now because IBM
approached them with an absurdly high price? Or did Redhat executives need to
shop around for a buyer, because they felt they were near a local maxima and
things were starting to go downhill?

edit: that said, this is a subject I care about and will be adding your
podcast shortly. Hopefully you figure out podcast sustainability as well =)

~~~
bonzini
Wait, are you really looking at the second derivative of the revenue? Q2
revenue (September 2018) was up 14% against September 2017.

Red Hat would probably have reached a local maximum sooner or later, so it's
probably a mix of the two, but I don't think it's correct to say that growth
was negative.

~~~
jldugger
> Wait, are you really looking at the second derivative of the revenue? Q2
> revenue (September 2018) was up 14% against September 2017.

Just going by yahoo finance data:

Quarterly Earnings Growth (yoy) -10.50%

~~~
bonzini
Oh I see that now. That was explained by the company as basically a single
very large contract that was lost to a competitor, plus a very very strong
second quarter the previous year (when you earnings growth was over 40%).
However earnings per share were actually above the analysts expectations.

~~~
jldugger
Yea, I imagined it could be a one-off but didn't bother to dig into the
situation further. The point is simply that we don't fully know the motivation
to sell. Or for that matter, the motivation to buy. For all we know, that
competitor is continuing to squeeze RHT's margins. Or maybe Oracle (purveyors
of Oracle Unbreakable Linux) approached the board with an offer to buy and
someone walked it over to IBM with a note saying 'care to beat this offer from
Oracle?'

None of this is evidence suggesting there will be another standalone open
source vendor. The model seems to be converging towards taking open source
technologies, buying a bunch of servers and sysadmins, and renting them out to
customers on an ad-hoc basis. In which case, I won't call it winner-take-all
but there's obvious economies of scale to be had. If we look at the recent
Redis and MongoDB relicensing debacles, it seems like a direct acknowledgement
that the cloud service model is eating their lunch.

------
zby
To update the terminology - the RedHat model is freemium - you give away
something to market the part that you sell.

The problem with freemium is always how much you give away and how much you
charge for. One idea that I have not yet seen is to do the split in the time
dimention - sell licenses that convert into a Free Software or Open Source
license after a year or two.

~~~
bonzini
Right, however the main difference is that the premium part is _not_ software.
There is no such thing as open core in Red Hat's offerings.

~~~
zby
I don't know - have you looked at: [https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-
platforms](https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms)

~~~
bonzini
Sure, I work for Red Hat. You pay for support, training, access to
consultants, certifications. All software is available for free, just with
trademarks removed.

~~~
zby
Just to be clear so you say that there is nothing non-GPL in the software that
is bought there?

For example [https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-
ser...](https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-
server#?sku=RH00005) specifies that this is a 'Self-support (1 year)' contract
- this sounds like there is no support, training or access to consultants
being bought there.

~~~
bonzini
> Just to be clear so you say that there is nothing non-GPL in the software
> that is bought there?

Correct. There are trademarked components (graphics, etc.) that cannot be
redistributed but they are not software. The same is true for Mozilla Firefox,
for example, even though it's both gratis ("free beer") and libre ("free
speech").

There are also a few "supplementary" packages that are non-free but it's stuff
like Oracle JDK or Adobe Reader. It's more akin to Debian nonfree than to an
open-core model.

> Self-support (1 year)' contract - this sounds like there is no support,
> training or access to consultants being bought there.

Correct, in that case you only pay for certifications, knowledge base (which
is also part of support) and access to the updates.

------
Annatar
"We had made the product so easy to use and so important, that we had out-
engineered ourselves."

Yeah, so "easy" that we had to debug and extend microdhcp code to properly
support PXE booting and add option 150 because you guys offered nothing with
which to properly boot XEN VM's; XEN was so woefully unfinished that we had to
finish it for you and now you're telling us how complete of a product it is
and patting yourself on the back.

"Details-schmetails", it's "the big picture" that's important, which is that
someone cashed out, am I right?

This is one of the reasons why my passion and love for computers turned to
bitter disappointment: the lies and really bad, half-cooked software. Damn it
all, Keith Wesolowski was so right[1].

[1]
[http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/](http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/)

------
jordigh
Why doesn't anyone try to simply sell free software?

You want me to give you a copy of the software? Pay for it. And here's a
gratis sample to see what could get, but it doesn't have all of the features I
wrote for it.

You want access to login to the web platform? Pay for it.

You want the source code for it, so you can modify it and/or redistribute it?
Also pay for it. The GPL has explicit provisions for allowing access to the
source code only if you pay, for example.

Surely _some_ money is to be made this way. Maybe not enough to create a giant
monopoly that completely dominates the market, but enough to make a living.
Not everything has to be a winner-takes-all unicorn.

If we are to believe that the copying of non-free software that happens right
now happens and companies are still profitable, surely explicitly allowing
that copying wouldn't make it any less profitable?

~~~
nordsieck
> Why doesn't anyone try to simply sell free software?

One word. Centos.

It's easy to devalue most of the engineering work put into a premium distro.
Businesses might still pay for it for mission critical stuff, but that's not
enough volume to run a business on.

> You want the source code for it, so you can modify it and/or redistribute
> it? Also pay for it. The GPL has explicit provisions for allowing access to
> the source code only if you pay, for example.

This isn't going to work.

1\. You aren't going to get much money. From the GPL (3.b):

> for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source
> distribution

2\. Only one person has to pay for the source. Once the source is out, other
people can just get a copy of the copy.

~~~
jordigh
And how is this economically different from piracy, which mostly goes
unprosecuted?

Also, you've cherry-picked the GPL. It talks about "equivalent access", i.e.
you can charge as much for the source as what you charged for the binary.

[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-
faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDow...](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-
faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDownloadFee)

~~~
coldtea
> _And how is this economically different from piracy, which mostly goes
> unprotected?_

That this is not even illegal at all.

And piracy in business settings is much more seriously and effectively
prosecuted. Pirating at an enterprise is nothing like the free-for-all of
pirating music or movies at home.

------
jenandre
This article has already been proven wrong... e.g. what about Elastic

~~~
jillesvangurp
Good example because their strategy is to move away from
consultancy/training/support as their primary business model towards shipping
add on services, cloud products, etc.

I was at Elastic.on beginning of the year where they talked a bit about their
thinking. They referred to 'other' OSS companies having contradicting goals
where in order to sell support/training, they make the base OSS product harder
to use and more complicated so that people actually need the support and
training. E.g. having great documentation directly conflicts with selling
training and consultancy. They did not want to differentiate between a hard to
use OSS version and a nicer commercial package. Instead they want users to pay
for added value in the form of bundled stuff that is not OSS (but now mostly
available for free), or cloud based SAAS products that they run for you. The
core product is the same for everyone.

So, their strategy is already exactly as suggested in the article: great OSS
that they actively help build complemented by SAAS business and other services
where they are making a lot of money.

Looking at their acquisitions, they have been buying companies that do SAAS
business on top of their core technology or support that business in some way.
Elastic cloud is based on one of their early acquisitions (a company called
found.no). Another more recent one is Swiftype which provides easy to
integrate search as a service for small websites. Then there's Prelert which
provides incident management and analytics tooling. In addition they've been
investing in building out geospatial data for the purpose of supporting
analytics use cases using their Kibana tool (another of their acquisitions)
and now included as part of Elastic cloud. They've bought packetbeat and
opsworks that both focus on infrastructure OSS that supports getting data to
Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Of course they also still do support, consultancy, training, etc. as well. But
that is a tougher business to scale because it involves lots of handholding.
That's actually a key problem with this business: you need lots of sales to
close deals and then you need lots of consultants to actually keep the
customers happy. Looking at IBM and Oracle, you can clearly see that they are
struggling there. IBM is looking to buy credibility for their cloud solutions
through Red Hat. They've been struggling for years with consultancy as their
core business and have been laying off people aggressively as revenues have
been disappointing. They have at this point very little in house tech to draw
in new customers.

AWS is all about selling their cloud stuff. If it's OSS and widely used, you
can bet there's an AWS service from them that you can use (e.g. Elasticsearch,
Hadoop, ActiveMQ, Mysql, Postgresql, Redis, etc.).

~~~
amyjess
> they make the base OSS product harder to use and more complicated so that
> people actually need the support and training. E.g. having great
> documentation directly conflicts with selling training and consultancy.

Interestingly enough, I've heard the same criticism about OpenLDAP, that it's
deliberately hard to set up and poorly-documented because the main developer
owns a consulting company and wants people to hire him to set up their
OpenLDAP installations. What's ironic is that this is one of the reasons Red
Hat is deprecating OpenLDAP in favor of the 389 Directory Server.

~~~
wyclif
_having great documentation directly conflicts with selling training and
consultancy_

I've often felt that way as a user. It's why I run Arch Linux now. There's
nothing in the Linux world as comprehensive as the Arch Wiki.

------
PaulHoule
I am not sure why the service business is any better.

Sure you can cash the checks you get from your customers and write out a check
for AWS. Or you can run a data center the old way or some new way. So can
anybody else.

There is just no moat. Running the service you can pocket the money you make
learning how to run it more efficiently. You share some attributes with
Salesforce.com but you don't have the patent portfolio and other proprietary
IP that makes Salesforce a great product for what it is.

------
pcpcpc
If legislation required (certain/any) publicly funded projects to use open
source software, whose code would be made freely and publicly available, then
open source would see a much greater market share and level of investment and
we'd likely see new open source business models.

------
davidw
The problem with open source software is ultimately that of scarcity:

[https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-
scarcity...](https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity/)

------
Annatar
In all my decades of working with computers, redhat was by far the worst
company with the most incompetent staff that I've encountered. redhat's
"engineers" preferred to spend time arguing with their customers rather then
solving their problems and severely struggling to understand where in the code
the issues are.

Where they particularly struggled were higher order architectural abstractions
and their consequences and system engineering for backwards compatibility.

Their bugzilla.redhat.com is chalk full if examples of struggling to
understand and debug the code and arguing with customers.

I sure as hell hope there will never be another computer company like redhat.

------
roman_g
I thought free software was about freedom, not how to monetize it. You can
never trust a service - only your own hardware (it's not quite possible with
modern mass-market CPU though, only on IBM Power or some dummy MCU or even
FPGA-based RISC/MIPS/whatever ) with free software on it. When did Linux
become about cloud and containers, not about desktop?

------
decentralised
"Sure, when you first launch a business built using open source components,
(...) you might start off looking a little like Red Hat. But if all goes well,
you’ll start to more resemble Facebook, GitHub, Amazon or Cumulus Networks as
you layer in your own special something on top of the platform and deliver it
as a service, or package it as an appliance."

I sure hope not.

The original intent of ICOs was to monetise open-source development, and now
there are many great teams with huge treasure chests building great software,
funding research and providing grants for anyone wanting to work on blockchain
and the wider web3 ecosystem without having to go through a token offering,
given the current sad state of affairs.

I know this isn't necessarily appealing for everyone, but for those
interested:

[https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/10/15/ethereum-foundation-
gra...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/10/15/ethereum-foundation-grants-
update-wave-4/)

[https://blog.aragon.org/tag/nest/](https://blog.aragon.org/tag/nest/)

~~~
empath75
I’m pretty sure the original intent of ico’s was to figure out a way to rip
off investors by issuing unregulated securities.

~~~
decentralised
It was really to fund research and development of open-source cryptographic
protocols which are usually out of the VCs radars.

The mechanism used was itself a revolutionary development, fungible digital
tokens (ERC20). There are new protocols for fundraising that are designed to
give token holders more control over the disbursement of rewards to the
development teams but the wider market still needs a good cleanup imho.

------
dep_b
Strange. Most hills look small compared to the Mount Everest and the
Aconcagua. That doesn't mean they're actually easy to climb.

Why is RedHat compared to the biggest companies on the planet?

------
mathattack
I won’t miss them. They’ve been a very difficult vendor to work with. At least
once they go to IBM it’s easier to justify sunsetting them.

------
z3t4
What is a better business model then taking something that is virtually free
and selling it at a premium !?

------
fuller00
I've been thinking about this for some time and I agree with the gist of the
article.

Most OSS that comes out:

1\. Either funded by giant megacorps because they're trying to commoditize
their competitor's edge: See kubernetes, LLVM etc.

2\. Common frameworks that people sell consulting around. This is tricky
because if your software is easy enough for consumers to use, they won't have
use for your consulting. This leads to this bad incentive of complicating
software where not necessary. See: Pivotal selling consulting around Spring
and Redhat etc.

3\. Anything that doesn't fit in #1 or #2 above is mostly not possible with
OSS. To think about it, we can just examine the most consumer facing software
that we use. Where is a OSS developed messenger app that is as popular as
Facebook or Hangouts? 20 years back, we had OSS for most consumer facing
software, Unix coreutils etc. Basically, today OSS is reduced to professional
frameworks and middleware libraries because that is beneficial to megacorps
and they fund this kind of software, but OSS by indie developers is pretty
much dead.

~~~
octorian
> but OSS by indie developers is pretty much dead

I have never seen a viable "business model" around F/OSS end-user application
software. Every time I ask the F/OSS fanboys for this, they either come up
short or ramble about "selling support."

The closest I've even considered was the OpenBSD model, where you keep
everything free and open, but sell the "official distribution." The modern app
store ecosystem actually improves the viability of this. However, that
approach probably has a lot of limitations.

That being said, I prefer to open-source anything I do that I don't intend to
make money off of. I personally despise the "closed-source free-as-in-beer"
model that some indie non-Linux developers seem to opt for.

~~~
fuller00
One of the most intriguing models to fund OSS that I've seen lately is ICOs.
The only downside to it being that it fits a narrow band of software which can
have a marketplace. So if you're developing the next coreutils "ls", I doubt
you could fund it with an ICO.

Another model is that of sqlite, where the core code is open but unit tests
aren't available. In effect, this is somewhat similar to selling consulting
but with fewer chances of you having to complicate your software.

At the end of the day, what's important is that the base computing be
available in an OSS fashion. Base Computing = Decent OS with GUI + An App
store. I think that's the direction Canonical should be going in and attempt
to make money by hosting an App store for Ubuntu, just like Google makes money
off PlayStore.

------
teabee89
Admins: the title needs "(2014)"

~~~
sctb
Updated. Thank you!

------
fuller00
One model that might work is the Unreal Engine model, so an OSS license that
is free for personal use, but for commercial use, it might require 3% (say) of
your profit from sales of the software product.

~~~
mrob
>but for commercial use, it might require 3% (say) of your profit from sales
of the software product.

That's not OSS.

~~~
fuller00
I think the discussion is centered around preserving the component of Open
source which includes funding for the software but retains availability of the
source. In such a case, it may not be possible to retain the full pure classic
OSS definition.

It might be best to just use Unreal Engine like license where the source is
available for inspection and personal use but still being charged for
commercial use.

------
yuhong
I dislike the current debt-based economy in general myself.

------
steelframe
tl;dr: Tragedy of the commons.

------
sandworm101
There is economics beyond that of redhat. Open source can and does exist
without profit. Lots of people donate time/energy to projects every day and by
doing so create great products that do compete (linux).

~~~
Skunkleton
While you are correct in general, Linux is not a good example of a project
that is developed without profit. Most of the major contributors and
maintainers of Linux are paid for their work. The companies that are paying
for this work make huge profits from Linux.

~~~
bonzini
Does Intel or ARM make profits from Linux? They need to have it run will on
their current hardware, and they can show future features in advance, but they
don't directly make a profit from _selling_ Linux.

~~~
Skunkleton
No one makes profit from selling linux. People make profit with devices
running linux, or by selling linux support.

------
AtlasBarfed
AWS largely makes money off of open source, it just provides virtualization as
a service along with the actual hardware. It may not be as straightforward as
RedHat, but it basically is the same thing.

~~~
buboard
I don't think it's the same at all. Redhat's model is to create open source
software.

