How to make money with linux

Let’s just list Red Hat, because only one Linux company has become a giant, with revenue expected to reach US$2 billion in 2015.

In fact, there are some answers here about how to make money, such as by selling open source code, providing paid services, etc. Now, the answer to this question has finally been confirmed. The company that was "the first to eat crabs" has proved through practical actions that it is possible to make money through free open source software. That's right, this is Red Hat, the world's most famous open source company located in North Carolina, USA. In fiscal year 2016, Red Hat's revenue exceeded US$2 billion for the first time, maintaining performance growth for 16 consecutive years.

Founded in 1993, Red Hat is an open source solutions provider that provides mission-critical software and services for operating systems, storage, middleware, virtualization and cloud computing. To put it simply, it is to productize projects in the open source community and make it easier for ordinary enterprise customers to consume open source innovative technologies. The free Linux operating system it provides has become the most used UNIX operating system in the world today, and the number of users is still growing rapidly.

To say why Red Hat is so successful, we have to start with its business model. Since its creation, Red Hat has adopted an open source model to provide professional technologies and services to global enterprises. Red Hat shares the system source code to users with certain qualifications, and these users can use and customize Red Hat products for free, but they need to pay a certain service fee.

Red Hat calls its charging model "subscription model". As long as new and old customers are within the subscription period, in addition to enjoying these supports for free, users do not need to purchase product upgrades again. According to the user's needs Can be updated at any time. The collection of fees is also relatively transparent and fair.

In addition, the development of cloud technology and big data has given Red Hat, whose core business is open source software, new opportunities. For Red Hat, the most important profit secret is how to compile Linux code and record detailed log data; create an index based on the content of the raw log data (Raw data), and save the index while also saving the original log content. In the era of big data, a wide variety of logs can be quickly analyzed to find what you need. This way, every company can download Red Hat's code and customize it to their needs.

As an open source software vendor, Red Hat originally had little to do with storage. After all, storage has always been a matter in the hardware field. However, with the advent of the software-defined era, this situation has fundamentally changed. Whitehurst said at last week's Red Hat Summit that Red Hat's storage is distributed enterprise storage and has been verified on a large scale. Users can provide extended services such as object storage and file storage according to their own needs. Based on the rise of Ceph technical architecture, Ceph can make the technical architecture more transparent and make all technical issues that may arise more transparent. Ceph can manage and monitor the data center in a visual way.

The success of Red Hat proves that "open source is a good business". The model of commercial open source software is actually not difficult to understand, which is to screen, integrate and optimize the open source code, and then engineer it. Systematization, service-oriented and commercialization.

Although Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has proven that it is possible to make money through free open source software, he is skeptical about whether Red Hat's model can be copied. For enterprises, using open source Linux products requires self-examination. If you plan to use open source Linux, you need to consider your own technical capabilities from the beginning. If you are very confident in your own technology, then you can use it with confidence and boldly, and this will not involve legal issues. If you cannot handle open source Linux, then you should take the initiative to pay the fee at the beginning, so that you save the need for advanced Expenses for operation and maintenance personnel, and also indirectly support open source Linux developers.

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