Red Hat, the Linux vendor has become the first open source vendor to cross $1bn earnings over a  period of 12 months. For the financial year ending 29^th February 2012, the company has posted record revenues of $1.3bn. The popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distributor announced its financial revenues of $297m for the fourth quarter, which is a rise of 21 per cent from the previous year.

CEO and president of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst said that,

Red Hat is the first pure-play, open source company, and one of only a select few software companies, to have achieved the billion dollar revenue milestone. The open source technologies which we provide are being selected by more customers every day as they re-architect the infrastructure of their data centres for greater efficiency, agility and cloud enablement.

While Red Hat seems more like an Linux vendor focused enterprise, most of the firm’s business comes from support, subscriptions and training programmes. The company has significant percentage of source code in the Linux kernel and open sourcing RHEL helps in creating a base for Scientific Linux and Free Cent OS distributions.

The success of Red Hat is shared with its wider user base and open source community. Looking at the success and revenues of Red Hat, it is apparent that open source operating systems can also help software development companies earn money. Unlike buying a closed source OS, open source OS won’t create a hole in your wallet.

With Linux gaining immense popularity, are you still hooked on to closed source OS? Well then, its time you need to get your hands on Linux. For those who are unaware, Linux can also be installed inside Windows with dual-boot option.