Open source's first billion-dollar company

Red Hat's revenues grew 25% in fiscal 2012, allowing it to cross the $1 billion mark at the end of its fiscal year on 29 February, making it the first open source company to reach the billion-dollar mark, Information Week reports.

Much of the company's revenue comes from its subscription products: $952 million, in fact, Beta News states.

Red Hat successfully fended off challenges from Oracle, which had taken the strategy of offering support for Linux at half the price.

"This achievement will finally put to bed the argument that 'nobody can make money with open source'," points out Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin. "Red Hat has worked extremely hard and extremely smart to leverage open source to make a billion dollars."

Over the past year, the company has released technologies to broaden its reach beyond enterprise servers and client computers and into cloud platforms, ZDNet says.

This is via its OpenShift platform as a service; its CloudForms cloud infrastructure; and its Gluster software-based scale-out storage technology, picked up via a $136 million acquisition.