Open source, free software and Linux – How does Red Hat make money? - by Jim Whitehurst
The open source model, by its nature, is a 21st century model. We don’t think in terms of, nor do we act in ways where we think about control. We think about influence. We don’t think about ownership. We think about communities of collaboration. So, instead of trying to amass intellectual capital, we try to distribute and build the largest base of capital around that. Now what that means in terms of the way executives need to lead is that we have to be a very, kind of loose, non-hierarchical group of managers who’s comfortable in a role of influence rather than leadership. And, you know, it’s particularly important because the boundaries of the corporation become very porous.
Somebody’s changing a component of Linux everyday, which again is great to add new functionality, but if you’re running the New York Stock Exchange, the last thing you want is for your core operating platform to change everyday. Red Hat offers a whole series of services that make the open source development model available to the enterprise. So Red Hat offers, obviously, service and support, and testing; but they also guarantee that they will continue to support their platforms and update some new hardware they run, security, and other patches for 7 years after a new version comes out. So, again, if you are someone like the New York Stock Exchange, who may spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars riding on top of that platform, you can be confident that for the next decade your application will continue to run.
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