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Re:AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source by cat199 on Monday January 14, 2019 @10:04AM (#18903449)
> the dream of a megacap open source company is dead

    https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RHT/
    Market Cap	31.055B
    S&P 500 Component
Or does this exemplify your point w/r/t RH for-fee bolt-on addons?
Re:AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source by cpitman on Monday January 14, 2019 @10:25AM (#18903620)
Red Hat does not have any "for-fee bolt-on addons", everything we ship is open source (or will be soon after acquisition of a closed-source company).

Responding to some of the other comments, Red Hat revenue is nearly all from providing enterprise support for completely open source software. This is critically different from "services", ie consulting. These are yearly contracts that provide clients insurance if/when they have a production issue, a new major vulnerability is disclosed, etc, that someone knows the technology from the ground up and also knows the details of their deployment and can get them back into a good state. Our support+engineering teams are top notch, so retaining customers year over year is relatively easy.

I work in Red Hat Consulting, which is a much smaller share of overall revenue. It doesn't scale nearly as well, since you only get revenue periodically for weeks to months at a time, with a lot of overhead to sell and manage assignments.

Re:AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source by aquaticsunset on Monday January 14, 2019 @11:57AM (#18904398)
To say "everything" Red Hat ships being open source isn't quite true. There's a lot of proprietary code floating around, especially in the supporting infrastructure. When a product is put together, the upstream sources are bundled together and released - often behind the paywall.

Paul Cormier has it right - "We're an enterprise software company with an open source development model". Not an open source company.

However, you're correct. Red Hat's value prop is in top notch support.

Re:AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source by SSLy on Monday January 14, 2019 @01:25PM (#18905083)
The only software that redhat "sells" that is not open source is: RHN and insights. Former would be pointless to open, the latter is virtually a service offering anyway.
Re:AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source by cat199 on Monday January 14, 2019 @07:42PM (#18907970)
apologies -

I nearly added a parenthetical that these were typically open source under a different name if bolt-on (e.g. 389 vs directory, etc). will edit.