via techcrunch: There is some disagreement with the notion that Red Hat is a 'pure play' open source company. I asked Whitehurst whether their earnings claims were just a matter of semantics: is Red Hat really a billion dollar open source software company, or a billion dollar support and services company? "We sell software," was his immediate response.
Rather than a specific, static piece of software, Red Hat sells you a subscription to their software. While the Red Hat source code is freely available, the compiled bits included in your subscription are not free. What you buy from Red Hat, says Whitehurst, is software that has been rigorously tested, known to be good, and is fully supported.