Demonstrating you can make money from Linux and open-source software, Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's president and CEO credits "enterprises increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures and open source technologies" for driving the company's strong results:
For the full 2016 fiscal year, Red Hat's total revenue was $2.05 billion, up 15 percent in US dollars year-over-year, or 21 percent measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue for the full fiscal year was $1.8 billion, up 16 percent in US dollars year-over-year, or 22 percent measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue in the full fiscal year was 88 percent of total revenue.
[...] Looking ahead for its 2016 FY Red Hat expects to see between $2.380 billion to $2.420 billion. At this rate, Red Hat should easily become the first $3 billion open-source company.
Related Stories
Red Hat, Inc. has announced that it is trialling a price reduction—to nothing—for its software, in an apparent effort to attract developers.
The Raleigh, North Carolina company is offering its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, formerly priced at $99, to those who provide their details at http://developers.redhat.com/. It is also offering its JBoss Middleware and other software at no charge.
When the submitter visited the site, the company was promoting an upcoming video stream showing a "sneak peek of .NET on Red Hat Enterprise Linux."
The story was reported by The Register (via CloudFlare, archived copy here), SD Times , Network World , BetaNews and ZDNet.
Related stories:
- Red Hat Becomes First $2b Open-Source Company
- Google Expands 'Open Cloud' with Red Hat Deal
- Microsoft Partners with Red Hat for Linux and .NET in the Cloud
- Red Hat is Buying Ansible
- Linux Security, Red Hat and Systemd Conspiracy
There's a whole family of Red Hat Enterprise Linux variants, each with its own users. So, what's the right one for you? It depends on your needs:
Lately, I've noticed a lot of confusion about Red Hat's Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and related distros, such as AlmaLinux OS, Oracle Linux, and Rocky Linux. In addition, there are Red Hat's own RHEL variants, CentOS Stream and Fedora. Mea culpa. It is confusing. Let me help straighten things out.
[...] many people used a community RHEL distro called Community Enterprise Operating system (CentOS) instead of Oracle Linux. Founded by Gregory Kurtzer, this was the most successful of the early RHEL clones. Indeed, CentOS proved to be far more popular than RHEL in such critical markets as web servers.
[...] So, first, [Red Hat] adopted CentOS in 2014. CentOS continued on its free license way, while Red Hat hoped it could persuade CentOS users to become RHEL customers. It didn't work out.
So, in late 2020, Red Hat changed CentOS from being a stable RHEL clone to being a rolling Linux release distro, CentOS Stream. In addition, the plan was that while Red Hat would continue to support the older CentOS 7 release until at least June 30, 2024, the newer CentOS 8 version, instead of being supported until 2029, would run out of support at the end of 2021.
That went over like a lead balloon with the hundreds of thousands of CentOS users.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:14AM
So much cat photos and duckfaces to datamine and so little time.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by D2 on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:30AM
Nobody calls a company a $2B company due to revenue. Market Cap is commonly the number tracked ($13B for RH today). Annual Profit would be another term occasionally used. But never Revenue. So, the headline is borked.
But what's really disturbing is that it mirrors an identically-borked /. headline today. At the least, fix the headline in the name of not being like /. and refusing to edit your own bad headlines or content. At best, hunt down and eliminate double-posts or other ways these could happen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:39AM
I think revenue is a more revealing statistic in the era of "unicorns" ($1 billion pre-IPO valuation) like Zenefits that haven't proven they have a sustainable business model.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:42AM
> Nobody calls a company a $2B company due to revenue. Market Cap is commonly the number tracked ($13B for RH today).
> Annual Profit would be another term occasionally used. But never Revenue. So, the headline is borked.
My CEOs have always talked about N-billion company in terms of revenue. Profits and Market cap are too variable to be an indication of the actual size of the place.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Non Sequor on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:53AM
Revenue isn't generally what you use to decide how much a stock is worth, but it's an important metric. It's raw income for the company. Profit is the shareholder's income within the company (maybe paid out as dividends, maybe rolled forward as retained earnings), but the rest of revenue is income for the employees and suppliers of the company. If you're deciding whether or not you want to be a shareholder, look at profit, but revenue gives you a picture of the scale of operations supported by a year's business.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Thursday March 24 2016, @03:03AM
This was addressed very well in other [soylentnews.org] replies [soylentnews.org], so I'll not address that point here.
Given the visibility and topic, I was not surprised that two different people submitted stories quoting the same article. Further, as the title is succinct and attention-getting (it got YOUR attention, right?), I well understand why both submitters chose to use that as the title of their submission.
You claim it is a bad headline. I, and others, disagree. Further, the story clearly states that it was $2 billion in annual revenue. And that, to my way of thinking, IS a newsworthy milestone.
Ever since the slashcott, I've only been to slashdot maybe a couple dozen times, and only to check on complaints like this, or to see if a problem on our site (which is based on a fork of /.'s early code) was also manifest there.
I suspect you are not familiar with how stories get posted to SoylentNews.
The story in question was submitted on 2016-03-23 at 13:47:43 (UTC). It then needs to get selected by an editor, reviewed/edited, and then placed in the story queue for release. In this case, the story was accepted on: 2016-03-23 at 16:05:41.
Part of the acceptance process is to select a date/time for the story to be released. Newly-approved stories are generally added on at the end of the story queue. I have seen the story queue vary from zero to 20 stories. Typically, there's about a half-dozen or so stories queued up. Allow on the order of an hour and a half for each story to run before the next is released. Doing the math, that means there is often on the order of 9 hours' worth of stories queued up at any one time.
Thus, this story was scheduled for release on 2016-03-24 at 01:05 (UTC).
It is neither our policy nor our intent to police what is posted on our site versus what is published on other sites. We provide a forum for discussion.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday March 24 2016, @03:45AM
It still has to double to make the high of 2000. Very bad investment indeed. Perhaps by the 2030 one could recover the loss, but again, another crash is due. If I am to bet, 2050 target date is more realistic.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @08:49AM
At best, hunt down and eliminate double-posts or other ways these could happen.
We're not the other site. In fact we have nothing to do with the other site. If you're reading it, that's your problem.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Thursday March 24 2016, @12:09PM
So, the method used for the Fortune 500 isn't a common way to indicate the size of a company? From a quick search:
The Fortune 500 is an annual list of the 500 largest companies in the United States as compiled by FORTUNE magazine. The list is put together using the most recent figures for revenue and includes both public and private companies with publicly available revenue data.
I don't think the word "never" means what you think it means.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:14PM
Or .... , you know, it's EXACTLY the same headline as the linked zdnet article. I think you're tilting at windmills my friend.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:43AM
Mo' money, mo' problems.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @12:58PM
Mo Systems, Mo D's.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:50AM
I still think the first company that comes to mind when you say linux and billions is google. Red Hat comes to mind when some of my colleagues behave erratically thanks to a borked init sequence, they nmap probe the IOT devices in range (very funny result with pacemakers) and finally catch fire. It happened twice. Since noon.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:59AM
But if Google announced they were moving to their own homegrown OS, nobody would be surprised, nor care too much except for the early adapter types who wanted to get in on their new OS. OTOH Red Hat is all about Linux, and will be until the company folds.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday March 24 2016, @01:59AM
Fuck systemd.
(sorry folks, happens every time I see RH on S/N).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @05:57AM
Two peanuts were walking down the street and one was assaulted... peanut
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @03:22PM
If it helps, I could post one of my Poettering-themed copypastas. You have the choice between the tried-and-true 'I met Lennart in a grocery store' and the thrilling 'Lennart rapes a dog'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2016, @02:06AM
Fuck BSD NeXT
Sorry, that's the BSD equivalent of systemd which my triggers my Turrets Syndrome to fire off as a defensive countermeasure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 26 2016, @05:57PM
What's up with NeXT ? can you explain more? asfaik it's another operating system. And not a *BSD one..
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Thursday March 24 2016, @02:19AM
My programmer wrote me: "I bet a beer I can make a $2B business in 20 seconds".
I replied: "high frequency trading?"
- "nope"
- "treacherous software, then? fake startup? drugs? blackmail? selling your girlfriend for sex? (this is an inside joke, his gf has to stay home when bear season is open)"
- "nope, look, I am done with the fundraising already"
He sends me a jpg of his wallet with 43 dollars (that's gangsta BTW),"here are your 2 B dollars"
Fuck his hex puns.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Funny) by nukkel on Thursday March 24 2016, @05:59AM
Ever since I discovered hex, I feel like I'm 23 again!
(Score: 5, Touché) by Arik on Thursday March 24 2016, @02:19AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @02:26AM
You guys should let it go. I spent more than a decade learning Windows and COM, before realizing that it was a walled-in garden that was pretty irrelevant to the direction where most of the software industry was heading. No matter, I'm still alive with no football-style CTE. We move on.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday March 24 2016, @05:50AM
A decade to figure that out!?
Anyway if systemd or something else messes up systems in the present. It's not something one can let go because it's something reoccurring that affect operations right now. Only stuff that isn't reoccurring can be dropped because they don't impose themselves again in the same way.
The clincher will likely be software that demands "systemd APIs".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @04:28PM
Well, I was getting paid. This was in the '90s.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @06:36AM
systemd can be saved. But we'll need chainsaws.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @04:51AM
Fuck systemd.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bitstream on Thursday March 24 2016, @05:44AM
Red Hat started by creating a Linux distro. Computer people tried it out and advocated it in the business environment. Red Hat sells out and get bashed. Logic 101. Every move they or anyone else makes that deteriorate digital commons has to be meet with enough negative feedback to make them back off.
Dead Ratting.. no plz.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Thursday March 24 2016, @09:52AM
I think that is a bit unfair. Thanks to companies like RedHat a lot of opensource projects get funded and managed professionally. You can disagree with some of Redhat's decisions, nonetheless I would argue the community is better off (and you too) due to RedHat. Hey, it's FOSS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2016, @08:08PM
Yes my dick may be warmer in your hands, but I still rather have it in my pants.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday March 24 2016, @11:05PM
...argue the community is better off (and you too) due to RedHat...
WAS better off until "the init that must not be named" was introduced. And now being made worse off by redhat trying to muscle it into being unavoidable.
Hey, it's FOSS.
Sounds uncomfortably close to "following orders" as an excuse.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Saturday March 26 2016, @05:54PM
Perhaps RedHat was good but isn't anymore? Even good forces may derail projects when they go bad. When they go from funding and managing what the community desires to just push their vision things go bad. Fund, Improve and Derail?
It's a lot easier to create software to solve something and have a natural interaction with others when there isn't a Godzilla in the room that may crush you from just putting down the feet carelessly.