Thanks for the link!!

Luckily it's not the only path for growth... As I mentioned we're a hardware company so it's more like we want to wind up as a Dell (or in a worse scenario, IBM, which isn't too shabby)

As the article the grandparent links to shows, RH is maybe the singular example of a big successful pure OSS software company. It seems almost all other big successful OSS companies have adopted some kind of 'hybrid' strategy such as open core, many after first unsuccessfully trying to emulate RH.

To a hw company, I think the issue of how to monetize SW is to some extent clearer as well as pretty different than for a pure sw company. You're selling a tangible physical product, but customers are not interested in the raw hw but the complete package of hw plus supporting sw (drivers, SDK, whatever) + support. So you have to choose what is the appropriate model for you. E.g.

- Use profits from HW sales to develop OSS that makes the HW more useful to customers, and thus increases HW sales. For instance, one argument in favor of this would be that drivers included in the upstream kernel and user-space software in distros makes it easier for customers to use your HW. And you'll get OSS brownie points which might also help drive sales.

- Or make the SW free but not OSS, in case you're worried that your competitors could just take your OSS and use it with their HW.

- Or make proprietary SW that you sell in addition to the HW. I'm not sure customers care about how you split the total bill they're paying, and free (as in beer) software is certainly a lot easier to deal with for customers (e.g. license hassles). But again, it depends.

- Oh, and another potential advantage of the OSS SW model is the 'commoditize your complement' angle (do a web search on that phrase if your unfamiliar with it). tl;dr You can use OSS SW to undercut a pure SW competitor, as your income is protected by your 'HW moat'.