
CEO: Red Hat potentially first billion dollar OSS company in 2012 - sthlm
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Red-Hat-Reports-Second-bw-474607315.html
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nkassis
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
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).

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jstedfast
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.

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SwellJoe
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.

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

<http://www.ovirt.org/>

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

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aliguori
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.

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sek
With all this inflation, not so impressive.

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

~~~
fatherlinux
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.

