Bonum Certa Men Certa

It's Red Hat's Day Again

Ron Hovsepian and Steve Ballmer with red hats



Summary: Red Hat continues to demonstrate that Free software as a business model most certainly works

RED Hat continues to impress by reporting a climb in profits, whereas Novell's Community Specialist uses some form humour to steer away from the reality that Novell may already be looking to sell parts of the company [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].



Reuters has the details which prove that GNU/Linux is an established and successful path to doing business, provided that it is not done as tastelessly as Novell does it (turning GNU/Linux into part of Microsoft's platform, .NET, as evidenced in Planet SUSE earlier today).

Software company Red Hat Inc (RHT.N) reported a modest jump in quarterly profit, bucking an industry trend of declining earnings, thanks to a reliable business model through which it books sales over multiple years.

[...]

The company, whose rivals include Novell Inc (NOVL.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), sells upgrades, help-desk support and bug fixes for Linux software. It has weathered the recession better than computer makers and many software companies because Red Hat customers buy its service in subscriptions over the course of several years, giving it a predictable revenue stream.


The axis of evil combined (Novell and Microsoft) is simply unable to hurt Red Hat. That's what they have intended to achieve for the past two and a half years, without success.

“One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat -- and there are a number of other Linux companies going public -- basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.”

--Linus Torvalds



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