Red Hat At $1 Billion

“Based on the run rates of the current quarter, Red Hat will
likely reach $1 billion in annual revenue in 2011. Only a handful
of companies, probably less than 20 software firms, have ever hit
this milestone. Red Hat will be the first open source-focused
company to break the billion dollar barrier. Certainly Richard
Stallman did not envision this when he created the paradigm of Free
Software. Such an event may be more in tune with what Eric Raymond,
Tim O’Reilly, and others had in mind when they reframed Free
Software as Open Source.

“It is easy to forget how important open source is now. Open
source touches us every day more than we realize. SAP likes to
point out that a huge percentage of the world’s commerce is tracked
by their software. It’s a defensible claim because SAP knows its
customers. Open source is harder to quantify. You can track
downloads but that does not accurately reflect use. For web
servers, it is possible to quantify use. The September Netcraft
survey puts the open source Apache share of web servers at 57
percent. Estimates of operating system market share, including both
servers and desktops, put Linux at 1 percent or so.”

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