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I see Red Hat's business model as a product of the times - there was this cheap, underutilized, but difficult-to-use competitor to the OS they really wanted to use, and a lot of corporations that really wanted to spin-up big IT departments and web services quickly. They filled the market need that existed in the late 1990s; it's unclear if this model fills any major market needs that exist now, when turnkey SaaS solutions exist for a lot. This doesn't mean there won't be other successful open-source companies. It seems like each generation of open-source projects fills a different economic need, all specific to the business landscape at the time: In the early-mid 2000s we had open-source as a retention bonus for good engineers and PR campaign for the companies involved (Hadoop, Nutch, Protobufs, Snappy, and other Google open-source projects, Cassandra, HBase, Hive, HipHop, and other Facebook open-source projects). We also saw open-source as a means of securing cooperation between different corporate interests (WebKit) or securing critical partnerships & goodwill by assuring the source code would be available (Chromium, Android). Starting in the early 2010s, we saw companies releasing an open-source product and then making money off a hosted version of it (Elastic, Datastax). Nowadays in the crypto world we see organizations releasing an open-source software system, reserving some of the currency for the development team, and profiting off the capital appreciation of the currency. (Ethereum etc.) |