Red Hat, the first billion-dollar Linux company
Red Hat announced the results of its fiscal year, stating that the company surpassed 1 billion dollars in revenue. More importantly, Red Hat is said to be the first open source company ever to achieve this level of earnings, a feat that shows how viable the “free” software business has become.
Red Hat’s total earnings at the end of its fiscal year (February 29) amounted to 1.13 billion dollars, and unsurprisingly the best part of the money (952 million dollars) came from subscription products: the company business model is to sell quality assurance, customer support, integration and training services for the Red Hat Linux Enterprise OS 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“This achievement will finally put to bed the argument that ‘nobody can make money with open source’", Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin commented on the Red Hat announcement, granting that “Red Hat has worked extremely hard and extremely smart to leverage open source to make a billion dollars”.
