Red Hat now first multi-billion dollar open-source company

There's a lot more money to be made from Linux and open-source software than you probably realized: Red Hat just became the first open-source company to make $2 billion. This isn't the first time it's set a record, either: four years ago it became the first Linux company to make $1 billion. All this without relying on venture capitalists, no less.

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst says "enterprises increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures and open source technologies" are largely responsible for the big numbers. In hard terms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and cloud operating system RHEL are doing better than ever subscription-wise.

The company expects to make between $2.38 and $2.42 billion in the 2016 fiscal year; if this keeps up, they'll set another record in short order.