I think the question is more: is there room for more than one RedHat?
They're by far the biggest and most notable "Linux company", and all the other companies like them have had a way of either getting bought to become a mere division of a corporate giant (like SuSE to Novell), or else losing money until they become irrelevant. It's important to have at least one or two corporate sponsors of Linux that won't "sell out" or screw the community in favor of their proprietary offerings.
If Canonical can get to where they are comfortably profitable and growing for two or three years, then I think we can say that RedHat's repeatable, but until then we'll only have the one example of a sustainable and successful independent Linux company.
They're by far the biggest and most notable "Linux company", and all the other companies like them have had a way of either getting bought to become a mere division of a corporate giant (like SuSE to Novell), or else losing money until they become irrelevant. It's important to have at least one or two corporate sponsors of Linux that won't "sell out" or screw the community in favor of their proprietary offerings.
If Canonical can get to where they are comfortably profitable and growing for two or three years, then I think we can say that RedHat's repeatable, but until then we'll only have the one example of a sustainable and successful independent Linux company.