Red Hat's Success Aside, It's Hard To Profit From Free

Red Hat, which just reported a profit of $47.9 million (or 26 cents a share) on revenue of $456 million for its third quarter, has managed to pull off a tricky feat: It’s been able to make money off of free, well, open-source, software. (It’s profit for the year-ago quarter was $52 million.)

In a blog post, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said the old days when IT pros risked their careers by betting on open source rather than proprietary software are over. That old adage that you can’t be fired for buying IBM should be updated, I guess.  In what looks something like a victory lap, Whitehurst wrote that every company now runs some sort of open source software. He wrote:

Many of us remember the now infamous “Halloween Documents,” the classic quote from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer describing Linux as a “cancer,” and comments made by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, saying, “So certainly we think of [Linux] as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market. But I really do not think in the commercial market, we’ll see it [compete with Windows] in any significant way.”...