Redhat free, why?

We are having a discussion in my LAN class for extra credit about how Red Hat is publicly held company, meaning it is making money for its stockholders. The question is how are they able to give Red Hat away for free, how do they make their money? Advertising was the first ting that came to mind, if anyone could maybe drop me a line on this I would appreciate it.

Red Hat is not free anymore. Just look at their site. Here are the prices. It is all subscription based. That is how they make their money.

Good Luck on the extra credit

The OS is free. They make money from selling things like boxed sets, and support packages.

dreamtfk said:

We are having a discussion in my LAN class for extra credit about how Red Hat is publicly held company, meaning it is making money for its stockholders. The question is how are they able to give Red Hat away for free, how do they make their money? Advertising was the first ting that came to mind, if anyone could maybe drop me a line on this I would appreciate it.

Click to expand...

Well Enterprise Server is about $2000. Support is expensive, and so are the books.

There is always the free unsupported version, and of course Fedora (redhat's fast desktop OS)

Not everything needs to be sold. Sun gives out Java Standard Edition for free, but they still earn a lot from it.

IBM gives away a LOT of stuff for free, like eclipse IDE and a few other stuff. So how do they profit when they keep on giving free love? Well, the answer is, they don't profit from software alone. It is the services that made the IT industry what it is today, and many of the companies earn not from the software but from services , the value added proprietary add-ons/programs to work with these opensource projects (think eclipse and the free netbeans), and technical support for paying clients(mostly companies , not individual users). There are even some companies that are services- based alone, and these don't even provide free stuff.

Another way to earn is by letting others have the option to close the source through a special license. What do i mean? Take mysql for example. It is free, i can build a yahoo clone and earn yahoo millions based on the database. But if i change the code of the sql server, i need to give it back to the community. I dont want that, so i pay mysqlAB a licnese fee and whatever changes i created in the sql server itself will be mine, mine and mine alone! hahahaha!

These companies, they don't earn from advertisers. Advertisers earn from these guys. Heck, why build and maintain your own distribution just to earn from popups? Setting up and running a forum would be eaiser if that's what they wanted.

From what I can see their main profit is from the services industry. That's why Sun and company is saying "RedHat isn't free, you're paying through the nose for support." Other companies (MySQL maybe?) also have this kind of a model. But there's not much else you can do in order to make cash with open source besides dual licensing your software (which is not possible with a distribution) and maybe getting paid for customizing applications.

-DarkArctic

I thought that with Red Hat (as opposed to fedora or old Red Hat standard) much of what you paid for was support, and the software bundled with the OS as its not all FSF stuff.

With Redhat (ala 7.3, 8, 9) you (as in average desktop users) would pay for support in the terms of Redhat Network subscriptions, which would allow you to get automatic updates from Redhat as well as early access to new releases.

Now it's a traditional licensing fee structure. We've got a couple of Redhat ES licenses at work but I have yet to get my hands on any of them.