Our subscriptions mostly pay for the salesmen and the ads. They sell ads first, IT second. So I’m not gonna cry for RedHat. The image of the poor developers working in a cave, struggling to make money is only in our mind. They had a perfectly functional model but decided to sabotage some of it to try to squeeze even more money.
Operating expense, in thousands (2019,2018):
Sales and marketing 1,378,278 1,195,286
Research and development 668,542 578,330
General and administrative 304,766 239,316
Total operating expense 2,351,586 2,012,932
Let’s stop talking about Fedora/redhat, we are literally doing their job for them, for free.
Oh, btw, their gross profit is mentioned here.
Gross profit (thousands) 2,863,818 2,488,664
Net income (thousands) 433,988 261,851
That’s why I had such bad support experience, because they chose to hire sales people instead of engineers. You have a better chance of being hired by redhat if you are a salesman. It’s as Steve Jobs said, when the sales people take the power in the company.
“If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums.”
The core of their business is made by the open source community. If they need our help for something, it’s from saving them from drowning into money.
We need to jump ship from redhat just like we did from reddit. This is also the perfect opportunity to think about technical solutions on how to use the fediverse to finance the developers of the open source community.
You’ll hear it in every company: Sales produces revenue. Everything else is a cost center. If a business could have only Sales and nothing else, they would.