Red Hat's growing to be a $1 billion Linux company, according to an article on the Register. How does it plan to achieve that level of revenue?

Some techniques include a strong developer base working on the Red Hat Linux stack and a strong distribution channel (more than 6,000 resellers). Strong Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4,5,6 distros help. THe company is also making its way into virtualization and middleware to fill up the software stack from top to bottom.

One of Red Hat's fortune-changing moves a while back was the abandonment of its popular consumer distro in favor of an enterprise focus. After all, that's where the money is. The consumer distro is now doing well as a true open-source effort.

Can Canonical repeat Red Hat's success with Ubuntu? Canonical is building its enterprise focus with the server distribution, and has built in a new UI to bolster efforts. But it still has a strong grasp over its consumer distro, which it needs to leave to the open-source community.

I can't say, but Canonical may be thinking that the consumer and enterprise sectors are highly tied to each other. Is that true? The consumer edition is a way to get users to adopt the server edition. But the consumer edition of Ubuntu is massively successful that it overpowers its enterprise/server edition.

Just how Canonical will proceed in the enterprise market will be interesting. Ubuntu may never be a CentOS, but it has the reputation and user base to succeed in the enterprise. The rest depends on Mark Shuttleworth and crew to execute. It may be a good for the company to draw some lessons from Red Hat.