Red Hat's second quarter results

[Posted September 19, 2003 by corbet]

Red Hat, Inc. has sent out a press release on its second quarter results: a $240,000 profit on revenue of $29 million. The company has now sold about 26,000 Enterprise Linux subscriptions; subscription income is now worth about five times as much revenue as retail Linux sales.

Others may decry their decisions....

Posted Sep 19, 2003 14:42 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

But obviously, selling subscriptions to the Enterprise Red Hat Linux service was a good move. I can't recall the company turning a profit before this, even if it's a relatively small profit. And we haven't lost the "regular" Red Hat Linux distribution, either; it's still available as a community-maintained project, and hosted on their website.

Plus, they've managed to find a viable business model which A) makes them money, and B) doesn't involve doing things that violate either the letter of the licenses or the spirit of the FOSS communities. Go them!

Red Hat's second quarter results

Posted Sep 25, 2003 16:59 UTC (Thu) by kingdon (guest, #4526) [Link]

Actually, $240,000 is *operating profit* not profit. The term "profit" by itself isn't necessarily used in these kinds of press releases, but profit would tend to imply "net earnings" which was $3.3 million. The difference between the two is in the "Other income" line item. Exactly what that is might (or might not) be spelled out in the full SEC filings, but I suspect it is mainly interest on the big wad of cash that they have sitting in the bank (about $300 million, still left over from IPO days - Red Hat has been smart and didn't spend it all).