A recent New York Times MarketWatch article highlights the recent revenue gains of open-source software company Red Hat, Inc (NYSE: RHT). While many companies sell licenses to use their software, Red Hat has a slightly different approach. So what does Red Hat sell you ask? They sell service and subscriptions. They haven't overlooked the most important resource in a service-oriented economy (their own employees).

According to the same article, "Total revenue for the quarter was $141.5 million, an increase of 27% from the year ago quarter and 5% from the prior quarter...For the full year, total revenue was $523.0 million, an increase of 31% over fiscal 2007 revenue..." For last year (2007), Red Hat was listed as having a net income of $59.9M.

When defining a business model, placing emphasis on the service of an open-source software product should not be overlooked. 

I learned the hard way that the SpeechSynthesis class doesn't run over ASP .NET when hosted on Windows Server 2003. Installing a demo version of Speech Server remedies this problem. Interestingly enough, it can be ran without issue on Windows Vista. I ran the same type of application prototype on a LAMP server with festival installed. The programming was easy and finished within a few seconds. If anybody knows of a better server-based TTS solution, then please leave a comment.