[nylug-talk] CentOS makes Red Hat(R) money, and works with them (officially so via Fedora(TM))

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2008-03-30 at 04:03 -0400, Sunny Dubey wrote:
> Apparently Redhat is doing pretty well financially:
> http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS9327789877.html
> Good news all around.

Red Hat is the billion dollar per year open source company for
2010-2020.  Oracle still hasn't made a dent, and in reality, Oracle and
Red Hat are more indirect partners than anything.  CentOS is still a
great complement to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and the duality and
involvement with the Fedora Project works quite well.  Red Hat(R) is
really a brand know for the amount of GPL is generates, total disregard
for IP (sans their namesake trademark, just like anyone else) with the
sheer number of developers employed and working on core projects
(especially the "less fun" stuff like GCC, GLibC, Kernel, etc...).

The good news is that there is plenty of room for two (2) others
approaching that level, and I see Canonical easily filling in many
areas.  How much and to what level is the only question, but they
clearly have a growing professional services group and they are charging
between $150 (non-support updates only for their 5-year LTS) to $5,000
(full server SLA with guaranteed response times).  Frankly, I don't like
the more recent demonizations of Canonical, although that's a good
indicator that they are starting to go down a sustainable avenue as
Shuttleworth's wealth on its own cannot sustain costs.



-- 
Bryan J  Smith              Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
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