
Red Hat becomes the first open source company to amass a billion dollars - aritraghosh007
http://blog.zenoss.com/2012/03/why-billion-dollar-red-hat-and-openstack-need-to-dance/
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joe_the_user
That seems to make them 1/69th the size of Microsoft by revenue but 1/270 the
size by profits. Notice that Red Hat's profits are about 1/10 of income but
MS' profits are about 1/2 of income. Shows the incentive to get monopoly.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedHat> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft>

~~~
reitzensteinm
Well, it shows the incentive to run a product company. Even with a monopoly on
consulting you're not going to have great profit margins.

That said, it really pisses me off that you were down voted like you were.
There seems to be a rash of that on HN now. You were contributing to the
conversation and backing up your argument with numbers. Right or wrong, that
doesn't deserve a drive by dismissal.

The voting buttons mean "More or less of this content on HN", not "I agree or
disagree". If you disagree, post a reply. You might teach the OP something, or
might even learn that you're wrong, as I have plenty of times on HN.

Edit: I've turned this into an Ask HN thread here, since I think it would be
helpful to have a discussion about this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275>

~~~
avree
Actually, pg has stated that the downvote arrows mean the latter.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171>

~~~
david927
Paul is wrong on this, though. We as the community should override that.

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rimantas
Let's be fair, people up-vote the stuff they like/agree with whether it
contributes a lot or little. Symmetrical actions in UI should do symmetrical
things, how hard is to grasp it? Something I like/agree—up-vote. Something I
disagree—down-vote. If you want different behavior then remove down-vote
button. There is "flag" if one thinks comment is inappropriate.

~~~
jessriedel
> Let's be fair, people up-vote the stuff they like/agree with whether it
> contributes a lot or little.

But they shouldn't do this _either_. Personally, I try to downvote--or at
least not upvote--comments which I agree with but which add nothing to the
discussion. (I'm sure I'm far from consistent, of course.)

I mean, the functional use of votes is to organize the comments page. It just
makes zero sense to organize the page based on the average opinion of the
community rather than constructiveness/usefulness of the comments.

PG is wrong here.

~~~
dhimes
I'm totally with you on this.

At the very least, if someone down-votes they should reply as to _why_ they
disagree. There a great sense of loss when you say something factual and
relevant and get down-voted without explanation.

When I've brought these issues up in the past, the conversation usually
resolves with "don't worry about karma." And, I don't, but it does change the
_community_ , and about that I worry.

Basically, the community will turn into whatever is rewarded. If you reward
hive-mindedness, that's what you'll get. If you reward interesting discourse,
_that's_ what you'll get.

~~~
0xABADC0DA
I'd like to see anonymous upvotes, but when you downvote you have to leave a
comment or it says 'downvoted by UserName' (maybe only for negative-karma
comments).

It turns a downvote from 'I disagree' to 'I disagree and everybody else you
should too'. You have to be willing to risk your own karma to take away
somebody else's.

For instance the way HN works now afaik, somebody could post 'me too' comments
to get enough karma to downvote, then turn around, downvote all posts
supporting some idea they dislike, and there would be no way for other posters
to correct this or know it was happening.

~~~
jessriedel
> For instance the way HN works now afaik, somebody could post 'me too'
> comments to get enough karma to downvote, then turn around, downvote all
> posts supporting some idea they dislike, and there would be no way for other
> posters to correct this or know it was happening.

FYI, I think that this is supposed to be automatically detected and nullified
by the website software, although I can't speak to the details.

~~~
0xABADC0DA
So you have a group of trolls that all upvote each other's comments. Unless
the system also penalizes upvotes then they get disproportionally too much
karma. And if the system does penalize upvotes then somebody that always posts
really great posts gets too little visibility because his upvotes look
trollish (ie maybe they come from the few people that really recognize an
expert in a small domain). It seems that an automated system is always going
to promote mediocrity.

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fruchtose
I'm glad Red Hat is enjoying this kind of success. We need open source code
everywhere possible, and we all benefit from businesses running on secure,
open source servers. At the same time, Red Hat has remained respectable, even
when other open source companies manage to alienate the open source community
with otherwise great software ( _cough_ Oracle _cough_ ).

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giis
congrats for them,for proving you _can_ make successful business out of open
source and continue contributing to oss :).

~~~
rplnt
They kind of proved this from the day one. Interesting documentary on this
topic is Revolution OS[1]. It is kind of biased and now very outdated but it
is still worth watching. If you haven't seen it and you are interested in
early history of OSS I recommend it.

1\. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308808/>

~~~
giis
cool,thanks.I'm not aware this documentary.Will watch it soon :)

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fudged
1) "Error establishing a database connection"

2) Ars had a great article about this one month ago
[http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/how-red-hat-
kil...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/how-red-hat-killed-its-
core-productand-became-a-billion-dollar-business.ars)

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ww520
Glad Red Hat is doing well. CentOS is great for production servers.

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dhawalhs
Site seems to be down. Link to Google web cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AweoOZb...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AweoOZbvjKkJ:blog.zenoss.com/2012/03/why-
billion-dollar-red-hat-and-openstack-need-to-dance/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
tbalinas
Thanks for that link. Did not know the blog went down last night until this
morning. Had not planned on an enormous traffic spike like that :)

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rjurney
Open source sucks as a business. This took way too long. We like to think it
works but... it kind of doesn't.

Not knocking open source. Just saying the Kumbaya business plan didn't really
work out.

~~~
corford
I suppose it depends how you define a successful bushiness plan. In my book,
if a company can create a business that employs a few thousand people, turns a
healthy profit and does all that while remaining true to the ideals of open
source, it's a pretty successful business plan.

~~~
rjurney
I agree with you, I just mean... as big as Redhat is, it is a shockingly small
company.

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mrothe
First thing I thought when clicking the link: "No, that's the wrong hat!"

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bickfordb
You know what's cool?

~~~
callumjones
Not bringing out that quote and instead contributing something informative to
the discussion, that's what would be cool.

