Red Hat may become the first billion dollar open-source software company in the world. Spurred by enormous growth over the past year and new cloud-computing offerings, Red Hat is well on its way to becoming a billion dollar competitor in an industry known for secrecy and locked down licencing. Red Hat is focused on what they like to call the "21st century business model" where they put emphasis on influence rather than control. Red Hat makes money based on providing support to its users of software that they licence as open-source. Red Hat focuses on organizing community and centralizing the development process in order to provide users with the best support possible. Red Hat also works to customize software solutions for the enterprise level markets. Many corporations may see an advantage to customizing open-source software but lack the time, money and resources that Red Hat can provide, for a fee. I believe that the future of software-development is headed towards a "Red Hat model" - Collaborate to form a base, then differentiate based on support, customization and innovation. Instead of focusing inward, and locking others out, companies like Red Hat will garner much more benefit from providing innovative solutions to businesses looking for software licencing cost reduction. This new software model will shake up the software industry and its big players, like Microsoft and Oracle. It won't completely destroy them but it will "spread around" some of the profits these companies have, for so long, controlled.
