Why Red Hat is happy to have others make billions on its open source dime Red Hat generates $2 billion in annual revenue but, by its CEO's own admission, that's not nearly as much value as it gives away. In a recent interview, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst likened his company to a machine tool manufacturer in the Industrial Revolution—a company that does well, but not nearly as well as the companies that put those machine tools to use to build, for example, cars. And yet Red Hat — on a "mission from God" of sorts — seems perfectly happy with its role as enabler of other multi-billion-dollar enterprises. As Whitehurst declared: "Open source basically has become a place where user-driven innovation happens in software." This is particularly pronounced at the infrastructure layer, leaving plenty of room for proprietary innovation at the application layer, as Whitehurst said, "most infrastructure is going to be open source and most business functionality above it is going to be proprietary." Intriguingly, Whitehurst seemingly admits that the latter is a much more lucrative market. See http://ift.tt/2gkmfis
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