For well over a decade companies have been trying to trade in open-source popularity for mountains of cash, and for well over a decade the vast majority of them have failed. Downloads, it would appear, aren’t readily convertible into dollars.
This has left Red Hat the only billion-dollar open source vendor, a distinction no one has seriously challenged.
Until now.
Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, an open source Platform-as-a-Service offering, just clocked the largest first-year financial bonanza in open source history: spun out of EMC and VMware in 2013 and trading since February 2014 Pivotal pulled in $40m during three quarters of active selling it said last week. As good as this is for Pivotal, it’s perhaps even better for would-be open source entrepreneurs, who may finally have a blueprint for large-scale financial success.
Read more at The Register.
