Sounds like a lot to pay for a company that sells free software.
Anybody can download and install it. It takes a lot of knowledge to support it. Support is where the money is.
Red Hat is proprietary and they charge up for their Linux software. It isn’t free - which is why businesses run it and get Red Hat support to maintain it.
They do a little more than that.
"Red Hat's strategic planning isn't like yours, but with 64 straight quarters of revenue growth and continuing on course to become the first billion-dollar-a-quarter open-source company, the Linux and cloud power is clearly on to something."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hats-only-business-plan-is-to-keep-changing-plans/
Sounds like a lot to pay for a company that sells free software.
Not as bad as AT&T’s mindless purchase of DirectTV for $48B, but close.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is what most big organizations run is NOT FREE. We have well over 20,000 RHEL Linux VM's and some 3,000 physical RHEL Servers in our environment. We pay MILLIONS for licensing and support, as does anyone a shop our size.
Red Hat sells professional engineering support for business servers. That makes that OS more attractive to businesses who don't want to bet the entire zillion-dollar enterprise on some suspender-wearing IT geek. (Guilty as charged, M'Lud). And by the way, it's worth every penny if you need it and I speak from experience.
I worked for an open source software company for a while. At first, it seems that giving the software away for free is a stupid business model. But it makes a huge amount of sense because here is lots of money to be made in support, training, and professional services work. About 30% of our company was developers writing the core software and new features every year. The money we made in support, training, and pro services paid for those developers as well as all the direct cost of providing that support, training and pro serv.
Open source software is supplemented by the entire community writing solutions and new features. All of it was contributed to the Apache Foundation and the process for getting new software accepted was very rigorous which assured good quality code.
With open source, you have continuity if one supplier goes belly up and disappears, too.
Red Hat went professional with that “Free Software” and has been putting out a superior product, with full tech support, for a long time....they charge for the worthwhile product which means most free-anything seekers only know that they deal in Linux and charge money...I considered them as an alternative to Gates and company but didn’t want to pay either....