Red Hat has at last shown that you can make a profit out of Linux - albeit not very much. For its second quarter, it reported a net income of $3.3 million.

And it has taken a huge sideways step from just offering a Linux implementation, promising adventures among a whole host of new, open source, application areas.

In announcing its Open Source Architecture, Red Hat said that the first layer was its anticipated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, available this quarter in a subscription licence. OSA will run on just seven hardware environments, though it didn't list them. This is a substantial improvement on the range of Intel x86 servers it has supported to date, with IBM mainframes and clustered Itanium boxes expected among the new platforms.

Red Hat also said that it would shortly fill out the architecture with a web applications framework, storage virtualisation and systems management, including system provisioning, application resource management, high availability options and end-to-end security. Beyond that, its existing Content Management and Portal applications would become part of the architecture.

Red Hat said that it is working with the ObjectWeb consortium, the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse IDE development community to achieve an open source web applications framework, J2EE implementation and associated development tools.

For the second quarter Red Hat showed 36 per cent increase in revenue to $29 million and the $3.3 million profit we referred to above. During the year-ago quarter Red Hat lost $1.9 million on $21 million revenue. Red Hat generated over $10 million worth of cash throughout the quarter.

It said it added 2300 new customers to Red Hat Linux with the total now standing at 26,000. However, it confirmed it would have done better without SCO Group's legal actions against
Linux. ®

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