APPENDIX
How Does Red Hat Make Billions of Dollars Selling Free Software?
People frequently ask me, “How does Red Hat make money selling free software?” This question comes up so often that I can’t imagine not addressing it in this book, even if it’s in an appendix. Let’s start with an analogy: why do people choose to buy a bottle of water, when the same substance is freely available in most of the world? All you need to do is open a tap to get it, just as you can go online and download, say, open source software code. Yet many people find good reasons to pay several dollars for that bottle of water or sign up for a delivery service: the convenience and portability of the bottle, the perceived safety of the water’s source, or even because people ...
Get The Open Organization now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
