I suppose it depends how you define a successful bushiness plan. In my book, if a company can create a business that employs a few thousand people, turns a healthy profit and does all that while remaining true to the ideals of open source, it's a pretty successful business plan.

I agree with you, I just mean... as big as Redhat is, it is a shockingly small company.

Other things which suck as a business - hiring staff, renting an office, paying taxes, advertising, getting legal advice ...

The argument is, contributing to open source helps solve your problem in a more sustainable way. Maintaining your own fork of Linux isn't feasible, so you contribute patches back to the mainline. But doing this can be ... daunting, so you might be better paying some third party to handle this for you. Thus Red Hat.

Now, your competitors get a free ride on your patch, but presumably they didn't have your problem or have sunk money into an alternative solution, so it's not like they get the same benefit you did.

It is not a get rich quick scheme, but Red Hat has amazing cred with the enterprise space and as a result user appreciation M$ can't even come close to touching.

I'd rather have a slow growing (yet growing) open company than a fast burn private enterprise that shrivels up because of the offensive for profit schemata.