Red Hat: Encyclopedia II - Red Hat - Business model

Red Hat - Business model

Open source software lies at the foundation of their business model. It represents a fundamental shift in how software is created. The code that makes up the software is available to anyone, and developers who use it may freely make improvements. Even competitors like Microsoft admit that the result is rapid innovation (compare the Halloween documents).

Red Hat solutions combine GNU/Linux, developer and embedded technologies, training, management services and technical support. Red Hat optionally delivers this open source innovation to their customers via an Internet platform called Red Hat Network.

Although dedicated to open source, Red Hat, Inc has one US patent for a debugger system (US6,754,891 [1]), one European patent (EP1312195 [2] [3]) and several US patent applications pending (US2004143687 [4], US2004153483 [5], US2004143776 [6], US2004158717 [7], US2005021637 [8], US2005071371 [9]). They also use trademark claims to restrict the freedom to share copies and redistribute modifications based on their releases ([10]). Not everybody approves of this (see [11], [12] or even [13], for example). But, since this company did a lot for free software, some compromise will be probably found in the future.

Red Hat, however, has placed a public pledge on its website to never assert patent claims against software released under any open source license that Red Hat itself uses in its own products (including others works bundled with their products like KDE).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Business model", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki