"It's not just Sun Solaris that Red Hat is winning customers from, but from other Linux distributions as well. Earlier this year, Whitehurst noted that Red Hat was beginning to make a committed effort to target free Linux users for conversion to paying enterprise Linux subscriptions. It's an effort that is now paying off, the company said.
"Whitehurst noted that Red Hat struck two sizable free-to-paid deals during its second quarter.
""One of the free-to-pay deals was a multimillion dollar deal with a financial services customer," Red Hat CFO Charlie Peters said. "This customer chose to migrate back to Red Hat after using a competitor's Linux provided to them through free coupons." While Peters didn't disclose further details on the parties involved, the transaction may have been related to the Microsoft Novell agreement, which involves Microsoft reselling Linux through a coupon offer."
